The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters

The
Mammoth Encyclopedia
of
Extraterrestrial Encounters

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The Mammoth Encyclopedia of
Extraterrestrial Encounters
Compiled and Edited by
Ronald D.Story

Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published online by Ronald D. Story as The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters on

RonaldStory.com, 2001
First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Ronald D. Story, 2001
The right of Ronald D. Story to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-78033-703-6 (ebook)
Printed and bound in the UK
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
In Memoriam
This book is dedicated to one of the great pioneers in the search for intelligent
life elsewhere—my early mentor and advisor—who inspired millions of us
earthlings to continue the search for truth wherever it might lead. His inspiration
will live on.
“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the
depth of our answers.”
Carl Sagan
(1934-1996)
Contributors
Gloria Alderson
Arlan K. Andrews
Walter Andrus
Robert Baker
Gray Barker
Charles Bowen
Arthur Bray
Thomas Eddie Bullard
David Chace
William Chalker
Jerome Clark
Daniel Cohen
Filip Coppens
Scott Corrales
Hal Crawford
Wes Crum
Peter Davenport
Steven Dick
Barry Downing
Frank Drake
W. Raymond Drake
Ann Druffel
Robert S. Ellwood
Hilary Evans
Robert Fairfax
Lucius Farish
George D. Fawcett
Randall Fitzgerald
Paris Flammonde
Raymond E. Fowler
Kendrick Frazier
Stanton T. Friedman
Daniel Fry
Peter Geremia
Timothy Good
Stan Gordon
J. Richard Greenwell
Loren Gross
Richard Haines
Richard Hall
Michael Hesemann
Budd Hopkins
Michael Horn
Patrick Huyghe
J. Allen Hynek
Philip Imbrogno
David M. Jacobs
Brian James
Debra Jordan Kauble
John Keel
Donald Keyhoe
Philip J. Klass
Martin S. Kottmeyer
Alvin H. Lawson
Roger Leir
Greg Little
Coral Lorenzen
L. J. Lorenzen
Betty Andreasson Luca
Bruce Maccabee
John Mack
Scott Mandelker
David Marler
Tim Matthews
James E. McDonald
William Louis McDonald
Howard Menger
Monarca Lynn Merrifield
Aimé Michel
Charles Moody
James W. Moseley
Joe Nickell
James E. Oberg
Thornton Page
Karl Pflock
Nick Pope
Gary Posner
Diane Prentice
Billy J. Rachels
Kevin D. Randle
Jenny Randles
Scott Rogo
Carl Sagan
John Schuessler
Berthold Schwarz
Robert Sheaffer
Seth Shostak
Zecharia Sitchin
R. Leo Sprinkle
Brad Steiger
Sherry Hansen Steiger
Dennis Stillings
Ronald Story
Frank Stranges
Whitley Strieber
Robert Swiatek
Susan Swiatek
John Timmerman
Jacques Vallée
Wim Van Utrecht
Erich Von Däniken
Donald Ware
Walter Webb
Dan Wright
Jennie Zeidman
Acknowledgements
The following acknowledgments and credits are considered an extension of the copyright page:
ABDUCTED: CONFRONTATIONS WITH BEINGS FROM OUTER SPACE and all other mini-book-review entries
by Randall Fitzgerald were revised and adapted by the author from his book Cosmic Test Tube:
Extraterrestrial Contact, Theories & Evidence. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted by permission of Randall
Fitzgerald, the author, and Donald Altman, publisher, Moon Lake Media, Los Angeles, CA
(www.moonlakebooks.com).
ABDUCTION and all other glossary-style entries by Scott Mandelker were revised and adapted by the
author from his book Universal Vision: Soul Evolution and the Cosmic Plan. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted
by permission of Scott Mandelker, the author, and Universal Vision, publisher, San Francisco, CA
(www.universal-vision.com).
ABDUCTION TRANSCRIPTION PROJECT. Copyright © 2001 by Dan R. Wright. POSTSCRIPT Copyright ©
1999, 2001 by Philip J. Klass. Adapted and reprinted by permission from The Skeptics UFO Newsletter
(SUN).
ADAMSKI, GEORGE. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
AETHERIUS SOCIETY. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
AIRSHIP WAVE OF 1896. Copyright © Loren E. Gross 1980, 2001. Revised and adapted from Story,
Ronald D. ed., The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
AIRSHIP WAVE OF 1897. Copyright © Lucius Farish 1980, 2001. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald
D. ed., The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
ALIEN AUTOPSY FILM. Copyright © Joe Nickell 1995, 2001. Reprinted from the Skeptical Inquirer
(November 1995) by permission of the author.
ALIEN GALLERY (text and illustrations). Copyright © 2001 by David W. Chace.
ALIEN ICONOGRAPHY. Copyright © Joe Nickell 1997, 2001. Reprinted from the Skeptical Inquirer
(September/October 1997) by permission of the author.
ALIEN MOTIVES. Copyright © 2001 by Stanton T. Friedman.
ALIEN ROOTS. Copyright © 1979, 2001 by Alvin H. Lawson. Revised and adapted from “Alien Roots:
Six Entity Types and Some Possible Earthly Ancestors” by Alvin H. Lawson. First published in the 1979
MUFON UFO Symposium Proceedings, (Mutual UFO Network, 1979). Illustrations have either been
redrawn or are in public domain. Reprinted by permission of the author and MUFON.
ALIEN TYPES. Copyright © 2001 by Patrick Huyghe.
ALLAGASH ABDUCTION. Copyright © 2001 by Raymond E. Fowler.
ALLENDE LETTERS. Copyright © by Kevin D. Randle 1980, 2001. Revised and adapted from Story,
AMERICA WEST AIRLINES SIGHTING. Copyright © 2001 by Robert Swiatek.
ANCIENT ASTRONAUT THEORY. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from
The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
ANCIENT UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
ANDREASSON ABDUCTIONS. Copyright © 2001 by Raymond E. Fowler and Betty Andreasson Luca.
ANGELS AND UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Barry H. Downing. Revised and adapted from Story,
ANGELUCCI, ORFEO. Copyright © Robert S. Ellwood 1980, 2001. Revised and adapted from Story,
Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
ANIMAL MUTILATIONS and all other entries by CORAL & JIM LORENZEN and those credited to APRO are
reprinted by prior arrangement with the Lorenzens, APRO, and by permission of Lawrence E. Lorenzen,
executor of the Lorenzen estate. Copyright to all entries reprinted from The Encyclopedia of UFOs
(Doubleday/New English Library, 1980) are held in trust by Ronald D. Story.
ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
APOCALYPTIC THOUGHT. Copyright © 1991, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and adapted from
UFO Brigantia (January 1991). Original title: “Dying Worlds, Dying Selves.” Reprinted by permission of
the author.
ARCHETYPES. Copyright © 2001 by Gregory L. Little.
AREA 51. Copyright © 2001 by Arlan K. Andrews.
ARNOLD SIGHTING. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
ASTRONAUTS, UFO SIGHTINGS BY. Copyright © 1978, 1980, 2001 by James E. Oberg. Revised and
adapted from The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980). published separately in
The Skeptical Inquirer, fall 1978.
ATOMIC BOMB AND UFOS. Copyright © 2001 by Daniel Cohen.
AVELEY (ENGLAND) ABDUCTION. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Jenny Randles. Revised and adapted from
Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
B-57 BOMBER PHOTO. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
BELGIAN UFO WAVE OF 1989-90. Copyright © 2001 by Wim Van Utrecht.
BENDER MYSTERY. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Jerome Clark. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald
D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
BERMUDA TRIANGLE-UFO LINK. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted
from The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
BETHURUM, TRUMAN. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by David M. Jacobs. Revised and adapted from The
BIBLICAL MIRACLES AS SUPERTECHNOLOGY Copyright © 2001 by Barry H. Downing.
BIBLICAL UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Barry H. Downing. Revised and adapted from Story,
BIRTH MEMORIES HYPOTHESIS. Copyright © 2001 by Alvin H. Lawson.
BOUNDARY DEFICIT HYPOTHESIS. Copyright © 1989, 1994, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and
adapted from Magonia (March 1989) and from the Bulletin of Anomalous Experience (August 1994) .
Original titles: “Abduction: The Boundary-Deficit Hypothesis” and “Testing the Boundaries” respectively.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
BUFF LEDGE (VERMONT) ABDUCTION. Copyright © 2001 by Walter N. Webb.
CASH-LANDRUM ENCOUNTER. Copyright © 2001 by John Schuessler.
CATEGORIES OF UFO REPORTS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by J. Allen Hynek and Ronald D. Story.
Revised and adapted from The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
CHUPACABRAS. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Corrales.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer and Ronald D.
Story.
COMMUNION FOUNDATION. Copyright © 2001 by Whitley Strieber.
CONTACTEES. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The Encyclopedia
of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS. Copyright © 2001 by R. Leo Sprinkle.
COSMONAUT UFO SIGHTINGS. Copyright © 2001 by Michael Hesemann.
COYNE HELICOPTER ENCOUNTER. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Jennie Zeidman. Revised and adapted
from The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
DAWSON ENCOUNTER. Copyright © 2001 by Billy J. Rachels.
DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer and Ronald D. Story.
DELPHOS (KANSAS) LANDING. Copyright © 1981, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from
UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow, 1981).
DEMONIC THEORY OF UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Barry H. Downing. Revised and adapted from
Story, Ronald D. ed., The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
DRAKE EQUATION. Copyright © 1998, 2001 by the SETI Institute.
EARTH CHRONICLES. Copyright © 2001 by Zecharia Sitchin.
ELK ABDUCTION. Copyright © 2001 by Peter B. Davenport.
ELOHIM. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
EXETER (NEW HAMPSHIRE) SIGHTINGS. Copyright © 2001 by Peter B. Davenport and Peter Geremia.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL HYPOTHESIS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by J. Richard Greenwell. Revised and adapted
from Story, Ronald D. ed., The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE, HISTORY OF. Copyright © 2001 by Steven Dick.
EZEKIEL’S WHEEL. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Walter N. Webb. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald
FACE ON MARS. Copyright © 2001 by Gary Posner.
FAIRY LORE AND UFO ENCOUNTERS. . Copyright © 2001 by Thomas Eddie Bullard.
FATIMA (PORTUGAL), MIRACLE AT. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ann Druffel. Revised and adapted from
FAWCETT’S “REPETITIONS.” Copyright © 1991, 2001 by George D. Fawcett. Originally published by the
International UFO Library magazine (1991). Reprinted by permission of the author.
FLATWOODS (W. VA.) “MONSTER.” Copyright © Joe Nickell 2000, 2001. Reprinted from the Skeptical
Inquirer (November/December 2000) by permission of the author.
“FLYING SAUCER.” Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Loren E. Gross. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald
FORT, CHARLES. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Loren E. Gross. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald
FRY, DANIEL W. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald
GALICIA UFO WAVE OF 1995. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Corrales.
GARDEN GROVE (CALIFORNIA) HOAX. Copyright © 2001 by Alvin H. Lawson.
GEOMAGNETIC EXPLANATIONS OF UFOS. Copyright © 2001 by Gregory L. Little.
GEOMAGNETIC INTELLIGENT ENERGY THEORY OF UFOs. Copyright © 2001 by Gregory L. Little.
GHOST ROCKETS OF 1946. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Loren E. Gross. Revised and adapted from Story,
GILL SIGHTING. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Richard Hall. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald D.
ed., The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
GRAYS. Copyright © 1994, 1998, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and adapted from The MUFON
UFO Journal (November 1994) and Magonia (February 1998). Original titles: “Why Are the Grays Gray?”
and “Varicose Brains: Entering a Gray Area” respectively. Reprinted by permission of the author.
GREAT FALLS (MONTANA) MOVIE. Copyright © 2001 by Kevin D. Randle and Ronald D. Story.
GULF BREEZE (FLORIDA) INCIDENTS. Copyright © 2001 by Bruce Maccabee.
HILL ABDUCTION. Copyright © 2001 by Walter N. Webb.
HUDSON VALLEY (NEW YORK) UFO SIGHTINGS. Copyright © 2001 by Philip J. Imbrogno.
HYPNOSIS, USE OF, IN UFO INVESTIGATIONS. Copyright © 2001 by R. Leo Sprinkle. POSTSCRIPT
Copyright © 2001 by Robert A. Baker.
IATROGENESIS. Copyright © 2001 by Robert A. Baker.
IMAGINARY ABDUCTEE STUDY. Copyright © 2001 by Alvin H. Lawson.
IMPLANTS, ALIEN. Copyright © 2001 by Roger K. Leir.
INSECTOIDS. Copyright © 1997, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and adapted from UFO
Magazine (July/August 1997). Original title: “Bugs Baroque.”
INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL. Copyright © 2001 by Stanton T. Friedman.
INVADERS FROM MARS. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer and Ronald D. Story.
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer and Ronald D. Story.
JESSUP, MORRIS K. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by James E. Oberg. Revised and adapted from Story,
JESUS AS AN ET. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
JORDAN-KAUBLE, DEBRA. Copyright © 2001 by Debra Jordan Kauble.
JUNG. CARL GUSTAV. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
KECKSBERG (PENNSYLVANIA) INCIDENT. Copyright © 2001 by Stan Gordon.
KELLY CAHILL ABDUCTION. Copyright © 2001 by William C. Chalker.
KELLY-HOPKINSVILLE (KENTUCKY) GOBLINS. Copyright © 1976 by Coral & Jim Lorenzen. Adapted
from Encounters with UFO Occupants (Berkley, 1976). Reprinted by permission of Lawrence E. Lorenzen
and prior arrangement with APRO.
KENTUCKY ABDUCTION. Copyright © 1976, 1980, 2001 by Coral & Jim Lorenzen and R. Leo Sprinkle.
Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English
Library, 1980).
KINROSS (MICHIGAN) JET CHASE. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Richard Hall. Revised and adapted from
Story, Ronald D. ed., The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
KLASS, PHILIP J. Biography Copyright © 2001 by Gary Posner and Philip J. Klass.
KLASS’S UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES. Copyright © 1974, 2001 by Philip J. Klass
LAKENHEATH-BENTWATERS RADAR-VISUAL UFOS. Copyright © 1981, 2001 Ronald D. Story. Revised
and adapted from UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow, 1981).
LEVELLAND (TEXAS) LANDINGS. Copyright © 1981, 2001 Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from
LUBBOCK (TEXAS) LIGHTS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Kevin D. Randle. Revised and adapted from
MACK’S ABDUCTEES. Copyright © 1995, 2001 by Joe Nickell. Reprinted from the Skeptical Inquirer
(November 1995) by permission of the author.
MAJESTIC 12 (MJ-12) DOCUMENTS. Copyright © 2001 by Joe Nickell.
MAN-MADE UFOS. Copyright © 2001 by Tim Matthews.
MARS AND MARTIANS. Copyright © 2001 by Thomas Eddie Bullard.
MARS ROCK. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
MCDONALD, JAMES E. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by J. Richard Greenwell. Revised and adapted from
MCMINNVILLE (OREGON) UFO PHOTOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Bruce Maccabee. Revised and
adapted from Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
MEIER CONTACTS. Copyright © 2001 by Michael Horn.
MENGER, HOWARD. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from Story,
METÁN (ARGENTINA) UFO CRASH-RETRIEVAL. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Corrales.
METAPHYSICAL ASPECTS OF UFOS AND ETS. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Mandelker.
MEXICAN WAVE OF 1990S. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Corrales.
MICHILAK ENCOUNTER. Copyright © 1981, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from UFOs
and the Limits of Science (William Morrow, 1981).
MIND CONTROL BY ALIENS. Copyright © 1994, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and adapted from
Magonia (June 1994 and September 1994). Original titles: “Alienating Fancies” Parts One and Two.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
MISSING TIME? Copyright © 2001 by Robert A. Baker and Ronald D. Story.
MOTHMAN. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Gray Barker. Revised and adapted from Story, Ronald D., ed.
NAZCA “SPACEPORT.” Copyright © 2001 by James W. Moseley, Joe Nickell, and Ronald Story.
OCCULT CONNECTION WITH UFOS. Copyright © 2001 by Paris Flammonde.
OPERATION MAINBRACE SIGHTINGS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Richard Hall. Revised and adapted
from Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
PALENQUE “ASTRONAUT.” Copyright © 1976, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row, 1976).
PALMER, RAYMOND A. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Daniel Cohen. Revised and adapted from Story,
PARALLEL TIME LINE. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer and Ronald D. Story.
PARANOIA AND UFOS. Copyright © 1989, 1992, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and adapted
from “UFOlogy Considered as an Evolving System of Paranoia” in Stillings, Dennis, ed. Cyberbiological
Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience (Archaeus Project, 1989) and UFO
Magazine (May/June 1992). Reprinted by permission of the author and Dennis Stillings of the Archaeus
Project.
PASCAGOULA (MISSISSIPPI) ABDUCTION. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Kevin D. Randle. Revised and
PHOENIX (ARIZONA) LIGHTS. Copyright © 2001 by Peter B. Davenport.
PHOTOGRAPHS OF UFOS. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
PORTAGE COUNTY POLICE (OHIO) POLICE CHASE. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Richard Hall. Revised and
POWERLESSNESS. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer.
PRINCIPLE OF MEDIOCRITY. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
PRISON-EARTH THEORY. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer.
PROBLEM OF NONCONTACT. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer.
PROJECTION/WARNING THEORY OF UFOS AND ETS. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
PSYCHIATRIC ASPECTS OF UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Berthold E. Schwarz. Revised and adapted
from Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF UFOS. Copyright © 2001 by Hilary Evans.
RECONNAISSANCE THEORY OF UFOS. Copyright © 1991, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and
adapted from Magonia. Original titles: “A Universe of Spies” (April 1991), “Eye in the Sky” (August
1991), and “Eye-yi-yi” (November 1991). Reprinted by permission of the author.
RELIGION AND UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Barry H. Downing. Revised and adapted from Story,
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS AND UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Robert S. Ellwood, Jr. Revised and
RENDLESHAM FOREST INCIDENT. Copyright © 2001 by Michael Hesemann.
REPTOIDS. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer.
RESISTANCE TO ABDUCTIONS. Copyright © 2001 by Ann Druffel.
ROACH ABDUCTION. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Kevin D. Randle. Revised and adapted from Story,
ROGO HYPOTHESIS. Copyright © 1983, 2001 by D. Scott Rogo.
ROSEDALE (VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA) CLOSE ENCOUNTER. Copyright © 2001 by William C. Chalker.
ROSWELL (NEW MEXICO) INCIDENT. Copyright © 2001 by Kevin D. Randle. Postscript “PROJECT
MOGUL AND MORE” Copyright © 1998, 2001 by Randall Fitzgerald. Revised and adapted by the author
from his book Cosmic Test Tube: Extraterrestrial Contact, Theories & Evidence. Copyright © 1998.
Reprinted by permission of Randall Fitzgerald, the author, and Donald Altman, publisher, Moon Lake
Media, Los Angeles, CA (www.moonlakebooks.com).
RUWA (AFRICA) LANDING. Copyright © 2001 by Michael Hesemann.
ST. CLAIR (ILLINOIS) POLICE SIGHTINGS. Copyright © 2001 by Peter B. Davenport and David Marler.
SCIENCE FICTION AND UFOS. Copyright © 2001 by Thomas Eddie Bullard.
SCHIRMER ABDUCTION. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
SCULLY HOAX. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
SHAPES OF UFOS. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Richard F. Haines. Revised and adapted from Story,
SHAVER MYSTERY. Copyright © 1983, 2001 by John A. Keel. Originally published as “The Man Who
Invented Flying Saucers” in the Fortean Times (1983). Reprinted by permission of the author.
SIRIUS MYSTERY, THE. Copyright © 2001 by Filip Coppens.
SLEEP PARALYSIS. Copyright © 2001 by Kevin D. Randle.
SOCORRO (NEW MEXICO) LANDING. Copyright © 1981, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted
from UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow, 1981).
STAR PEOPLE, THE. Copyright © 2001 by Brad Steiger.
STORY’S UFO “OBSERVATIONS.” Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
TEHRAN (IRAN) JET CHASE. Copyright © 1981, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from
THREAT, UFO-ET. Copyright © 1992, 1993, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and adapted from
Magonia. Original titles: “What’s Up, Doc?” (October 1992), “Swinging Thru the Sixties” (March 1993),
and “Sham and Shepherds: The Seventies and So Forth” (June 1993). Reprinted by permission of the
author.
TRANSFORMATION REQUIRED TO JOIN THE GALACTIC SOCIETY. Copyright © 2001 by Donald M. Ware.
TREMONTON (UTAH) MOVIE. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Kevin D. Randle. Revised and adapted from
TUJUNGA CANYON (CALIFORNIA) CONTACTS. Copyright © 2001 by Ann Druffel.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Copyright © 1976, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from The
Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row, 1976).
UFO DEFINED. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
UFO INCIDENT, THE. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
UFOLOGY. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
UMMO AFFAIR. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Corrales.
VALENSOLE (FRANCE) LANDING. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Charles Bowen and Aimé Michel. Revised
and adapted from Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library,
1980).
VALENTICH DISAPPEARANCE. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by William C. Chalker. Revised and adapted from
VAN TASSEL, GEORGE. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Robert S. Ellwood, Jr. Revised and adapted from
VARGINHA (BRAZIL) ENCOUNTERS OF 1996. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Corrales.
VILLAS BOAS ABDUCTION. Copyright © 2001 by Scott Corrales.
WAR OF THE WORLDS. Copyright © 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer and Ronald D. Story.
WASHINGTON NATIONAL JET CHASE. Copyright © 1981, 2001 by Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted
from UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow, 1981).
WAVES AND FLAPS, UFO. Copyright © 1995, 1996, 2001 by Martin S. Kottmeyer. Revised and adapted
from The Anomalist. Original title: “UFO Flaps: An Analysis” (Winter 1995/96). Reprinted by permission
of the author and Patrick Huyghe of The Anomalist.
WELLINGTON-KAIKOURA (NEW ZEALAND) RADAR-VISUAL UFO SIGHTINGS. Copyright © 1981, 2001 by
Ronald D. Story. Revised and adapted from UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow, 1981).
X-FILES, THE. Copyright © 2001 by Ronald D. Story.
YORBA LINDA (CALIFORNIA) UFO PHOTO. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Ann Druffel. Revised and
ZWISCHENBERGEN (SWITZERLAND) PHOTO CASE. Copyright © 2001 by Wim Van Utrecht.

Unless otherwise noted, all material in this book is copyrighted (© 2001) by the
author whose name appears at the end of the individual entry. Compilation
copyright is held by Ronald D. Story. www.RonaldStory.com
Contents
Dedication
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Contents
Editor’s Preface
List of Entries
A
Abducted: Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space
Abduction
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens
Abduction Transcription Project
Abductions
Above Top Secret
Adamski, George
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO)
Aetherius Society
AFR-190
Airship wave of 1896
Airship wave of 1897
Alien autopsy film
Alien gallery
Alien iconography
Alien Identities
Alien Impact
Alien motives
Alien roots
Alien types
Allagash abduction
Allende letters
America West Airlines sighting
Anatomy of a Phenomenon
Ancient Astronaut and SETI Society
Ancient astronaut theory
Ancient UFOs
Andreasson abductions
Andreasson Affair
Andrews, Arlan K.
Andrus, Walter H.
Angelic kingdom
Angels and Aliens
Angels and UFOs
Angels: God’s Secret Agents
Angelucci, Orfeo
Animal mutilations
Anomalist, The
Anthropic Principle
Apocalyptic thought connected with UFOs and ETs
Archetypes
Are We Alone?
Area 51
Arnold sighting
Ashtar Command
Astrogenesis
Astronauts, UFO sightings by
Atomic bomb and UFOs
Aveley (England) abduction
Avensa Airline hoax
B
B-57 bomber photo
Baker, Robert
Balwyn (Australia) photo
Behind the Flying Saucers
Belgian UFO wave of 1989-90
Bender mystery
Bermuda Triangle-UFO link
Bethurum, Truman
Bible and Flying Saucers, The
Biblical miracles as supertechnology
Biblical UFOs
Birth memories hypothesis
Book of the Damned
Boundary deficit hypothesis
Breakthrough
British UFO Research Association (BUFORA)
Buff Ledge (Vermont) abduction
Bullard, Thomas Eddie
C
Case for the UFO, The
Cash-Landrum encounter
Categories of UFO reports
Chalker, William C.
Channeling
Chariots of the Gods?
Chupacabras
Clark, Jerome
Clear Intent
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Colony: Earth
Coming of the Saucers, The
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
(CSICOP)
Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Communion
Communion Foundation
Confederation of Planets in Service to the Infinite Creator
Contactees
Corrales, Scott
Cosmic Consciousness
Cosmonaut UFO sightings
Cowichan (Canada) encounter
Coyne helicopter encounter
Crash at Corona
Crop circles
D
Davenport, Peter B.
Dawson encounter
Day After Roswell, The
Day the Earth Stood Still, The
Delphos (Kansas) landing
Demon-Haunted World, The
Demonic theory of UFOs
Densification
Dick, Steven J.
Did Spacemen Colonise the Earth?
Downing, Barry
Drake equation
Drake, Frank
Drake, W. Raymond
Druffel, Ann
E
Earth Chronicles
Edge of Reality, The
Eighth Tower, The
Elk abduction
Ellwood, Robert S.
Elohim
Elohim of Peace
Encyclopedia of UFOs, The
Ether Ship and Its Solution, The
Evans, Hilary
Exeter (New Hampshire) sightings
Extra-celestial
Extra-sensory perception (ESP)
Extraterrestrial (ET)
Extraterrestrial Civilizations
Extraterrestrial Encounter
Extraterrestrial hypothesis
Extraterrestrial life, history of
Extraterrestrial Visitations from Prehistoric Times to the Present
Extraterrestrials... Where are They?
Eyes of the Sphinx, The
Ezekiel’s wheel
F
Face on Mars
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
Fairy lore and UFO encounters
FATE magazine
Fatima (Portugal), miracle at
Fawcett, George D.
Fawcett’s “Repetitions”
Fire Came By, The
Fitzgerald, Randall
Flatwoods (W. Va.) “monster”
“Flying Saucer”
Flying Saucer Occupants
Flying Saucers
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery
Flying Saucers are Real, The
Flying Saucers from Outer Space
Flying Saucers Have Landed
Flying Saucers–Serious Business
Flying Saucers Uncensored
Foo fighters
Fort, Charles
Fowler, Raymond E.
Friedman, Stanton T.
Fry, Daniel W.
Fund for UFO Research
G
Galactic Club, The
Galicia UFO wave of 1995
Garden Grove (California) Hoax
Geomagnetic explanations of UFOs
Geomagnetic intelligent energy theory of UFOs
Ghost rockets of 1946
Gill sighting
God Drives a Flying Saucer
Gods of Eden, The
Gods or Spacemen?
Good,Timothy
Grays
Great Falls (Montana) movie
Guardians of the Universe?
Gulf Breeze (Florida) incidents
H
Haines, Richard F.
Hall, Richard H.
Harmonic 33
Harvest
Hesemann, Michael
Higdon experience
Higher self
Hill abduction
Hollow Earth, The
Home of the Gods, The
Hopkins, Budd
Hudson Valley (New York) UFO sightings
Humanoids, The
Hynek, J. Allen
Hynek UFO Report, The
Hypnosis, use of, in UFO Investigations
I
Iatrogenesis
Imaginary Abductee Study
Implants, alien
Incident at Exeter
Insectoids
Intelligent Life in the Universe
Interstellar travel
Interrupted Journey, The
Into the Fringe: A True Story of Alien Abduction
Intruders
Invaders from Mars
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Invisible College, The
Invisible Residents
Is Another World Watching?
Is Anyone Out There?
J
J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS)
Jacobs, David M.
JAL Flight #1628
Jessup, Morris K.
Jesus as an ET
Jesus Christ: Heir to the Astronauts
Jordan-Kauble, Debra
Jung, Carl Gustav
K
Kecksberg (Pennsylvania) Incident
Keel, John A.
Kelly Cahill abduction
Kelly-Hopkinsville (Kentucky) goblins
Kentucky abduction
Keyhoe, Donald E.
Kinross (Michigan) jet chase
Klass, Philip J.
Klass’s UFOlogical Principles
Kottmeyer, Martin S.
Kundalini
L
Lakenheath-Bentwaters Radar-visual UFOs
Lawson, Alvin H.
Levelland (Texas) landings
Light Years
Lorenzen, Coral E.
Lorenzen, L. J.
Lost Tribes from Outer Space, The
Lubbock (Texas) lights
Lucid dreams
M
Maccabee, Bruce
Mack, John E.
Mack’s abductees
Maitreya
Majestic 12 (MJ-12) documents
Mandelker, Scott
Manna Machine, The
Man-made UFOs
Mars and Martians
Mars Rock
Matthews, Tim
McDonald, James E.
McMinnville (Oregon) photos
Meier contacts
Menger, Howard
Menzel, Donald H.
Messages from the Stars
Messengers of Deception
Metán (Argentina) UFO Crash-retrieval
Metaphysical aspects of UFOs and ETs
Mexican wave of 1990s
Michel, Aimé
Michilak encounter
Mind control by aliens
Missing Time
Missing time?
Monuments of Mars, The
Moody abduction
Morel encounter
Morning of the Magicians, The
Moseley, James W.
Mothman
Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)
Mysteries of Time and Space
N
NASA Fact Sheet on UFOs
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP)
Nazca “spaceport”
Near-death experience (NDE)
Nickell, Joe
No Earthly Explanation
O
Oberg, James E.
Occult connection with UFOs
Omega Project, The
One Hundred Thousand Years of Unknown History
Operation Mainbrace sightings
Out-of-body experience (OBE)
P
Palenque “astronaut”
Palmer, Raymond A.
Paradox: The Case for the Extraterrestrial Origin of Man
Parallel Time Line
Paranoia and UFOs
Parra incident
Pascagoula (Mississippi) abduction
Passport to Magonia
Pflock, Karl T.
Phoenix (Arizona) lights
Photographs of UFOs (gallery)
Piata Beach (Brazil) photos
Pope, Nick
Portage County police (Ohio) police chase
Powerlessness
Principle of Mediocrity
Prison Earth theory
Problem of Noncontact
Program for Extraordinary Experience Research, The (PEER)
Project Blue Book
Project Magnet
Projection/warning theory of UFOs and ETs
Psychiatric aspects of UFOs
Psychosocial aspects of UFOs
Q
Quaroble (France) landing
R
Randle, Kevin
Randles, Jenny
Reconnaissance theory of UFOs
Religion and UFOs
Religious movements and UFOs
Rendlesham Forest incident
Report on Communion
Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, The
Reptoids
Resistance to abductions
Revelations
Roach abduction
Robertson Panel
Rogo hypothesis
Rosedale (Victoria, Australia) Close encounter
Roswell Incident, The

Roswell (New Mexico) incident
Roswell UFO Crash, The
Ruwa (Africa) landing
S
Sagan, Carl
St. Clair (Illinois) police sightings
San Carlos Venezuela) incident
Schwarz, Berthold E.
Science fiction and UFOs
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, The
The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography
Schirmer abduction
Schuessler, John
Scully hoax
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
SETI Institute
Secret Life
Shapes of UFOs
Shaver mystery
Sheaffer, Robert M.
Shostak, Seth
Sirius Mystery, The
Sitchin, Zecharia
Situation Red: The UFO Siege
Sky People, The
Sleep paralysis
Socorro (New Mexico) landing
Sorell (Australia) saucers
Soul exchange
Soul transfer
Space Brothers
Space-Gods Revealed, The
Spaceships of Ezekiel, The
Spaceships of the Pleiades
Space-Time Transients
Sprinkle, R. Leo
Star People
Star People, The
Steiger, Brad
Steiger, Sherry Hansen
Stillings, Dennis
Story, Ronald D.
Story’s UFO “observations”
Stranger at the Pentagon
Stranges, Frank E.
Strauch photo
Strieber, Whitley
Swiatek, Robert P.
T
Takeda (Japan) photo
Tehran (Iran) jet chase
Temple of the Stars
Theories, UFO
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers
They Live in the Sky
Those Gods Who Made Heaven and Earth

Threat, The
Threat, UFO-ET
Timmerman, John
Top Secret/Majic
Transformation required to join the Galactic Society
Tremonton (Utah) movie
Truth About Flying Saucers, The
Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, The
Tujunga Canyon (California) Abductions
Tujunga Canyon Contacts, The
12th Planet, The
2001: A Space Odyssey
U
UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game
UFO and the Bible
UFO defined
UFO Enigma, The
UFO Exist!
UFO Incident, The
UFO Missionairies Extraordinary
UFO Retrievals
UFO Verdict, The
UFOlogy
UFOlogy
UFOnauts, The
UFOs: Explained
UFOs—Identified
UFO’s: Nazi Secret Weapon?
UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse
UFOs Over the Americas
UFOs: What on Earth is Happening?
Ultimate Encounter
UMMO affair
Unidentified, The
Uninvited Visitors
University of Colorado UFO Project
Uri
V
Valensole (France) landing
Vallée, Jacques
Valentich disappearance
Van Tassel, George
Varginha (Brazil) encounters of 1996
Villas Boas abduction
Von Däniken, Erich
W
Walk-in
Walton abduction
Wanderer
War of the Worlds
Ware, Donald M.
Washington National jet chase
Waves and flaps, UFO
Watch the Skies!
Watchers, The
We Are Not Alone
We Are Not the First
We Met the Space People
Web sites, UFO/ET-related
Webb, Walter
Wellington-Kaikoura (New Zealand) radar/visual UFO sightings
When Time Began
Whispers from Space
Window areas
Witnessed
X
X-Files, The
Y
Yorba Linda (California) UFO photo
Yungay (Peru) photos
Z
Zeidman, Jennie
Zwischenbergen (Switzerland) photo case
Editor’s Preface
If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Voices from the Sky, (1965)
During the compilation of this encyclopedia, I experienced something of a

revelation. If recent world events have proved anything, it is that we need a
wake-up call – which is how I read the “voices from the sky” that constitute the
modern UFO myth.
The first point I would like to clarify is the use of the term “myth”. In my
view, myth is a thought pattern or paradigm, very much like a scientific theory.
Even scientific theories should not be taken too literally, and myths and not
literal at all. That is not to say, however, that myths are false. Quite the
contrary: myths contain truths that require symbolic interpretation; and if myths
are viewed as analogies, the truths do ring out.
My 25-year study has revealed a constant parallel between UFOlogy and the
human condition, somewhat like science fiction, except that the UFO myth
develops naturally as a component of human perception. It is not a matter of
“special creation” (as in the case of science fiction), but rather it evolves over
time, just as we evolve as a joint-product of genetics and our environment.
Curiously, the space-aliens’ concerns have likewise tracked human social
evolution. Not only do the aliens usually appear humanoid; their primary
concerns (even to the point of fetishes) always match the primary concerns of
humanity at various social milieus. In the 1940s and 50s, warnings of atomic
radiation and nuclear holocaust were in vogue, later to be replaced by concern
for the Earth’s environment. Then the aliens got involved in genetic
engineering – at precisely the same moment is history when we earthlings
began to crack the genetic code.
Our visitors now seem to have drawn battle lines between two camps: (1)
the “evil ones” who seem to be laying plans for our enslavement and/or
destruction, and (2) the “wise ones” – a kinder, gentler race of celestial gods or
saviour types – who are concerned for our welfare. These “technological
angels”, as the eminent psychologist Carl Jung called them, are here apparently
to save our souls and lead us into a higher realm of cosmic consciousness. In
between lies a “gray area”, as UFO theorist Martin Kottmeyer calls it,
populated by a race of emotionless clones who have come to be known
collectively as the “Grays”. Theories vary as to what exactly they’re up to – the
very fact of which seems to mirror the uncertainty we humans feel about our
own future.
Lest the reader misunderstand, please hear me out. Though I have serious
doubts about the aliens as literal space visitors (while not denying the
possibility), their psychological reality as barometers and analogues to the
human condition is, I believe, a matter of extreme importance. That is why I
feel it is vital that we hear what they have to tell us.
Especially on issues such as the nuclear threat, ecology, genetic engineering,
lack of spirituality and continuing dehumanization, the aliens have wisely
spoken. Our global lack of wisdom and lack of foresight may be something
only a superior extraterrestrial (or ultraterrestrial) intelligence is qualified to
speak about. Could that be why our modern mythology takes that form?
In a nutshell, the aliens whom I call the “wise ones” seem to be telling us (at
least those of us in the industrialized world) that we have succumbed to a
soulless materialism that will ultimately do us all in. This may explain why the
aliens do not pass on to us any of their technological secrets. Why should they,
if we cannot manage properly the technology we already have? On this point, I
am haunted by Albert Schweitzer’s statement that “Man has lost the capacity to
foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth” (Quoted by Rachel
Carson in Silent Spring, 1962).
I have tried to explain my own views in two entries: ‘Projection/Warning
Theory of UFOs and ETs’ and ‘Story’s UFO “Observations”.’ Like never
before, we seem to have come to a crossroads in our evolution that will
determine whether we enter heaven or hell for real. We must learn to read the
sense within the nonsense and begin to implement the wisdom of the ages
(whether it comes from angels or aliens): the wisdom we all know, but do not
practice. According to my interpretation, the bottom line is that we are always
engaged in a war of good and evil forces – at all times and in all places.
While it is easy to poke fun at the “contactees” and “abductees”, I believe it
is wiser to examine the meaning behind it all. I think that most things happen
for a reason, and that includes the UFO phenomenon and the experiences that
are part of it. Of course it is easy to debunk so many of the stories as complete
nonsense. But I think it behooves us to interpret the phenomenon – as one
would interpret a dream – and seek to understand its underlying message.
—RONALD D.STORY
(2002)
A
Abducted: Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space (Berkley,

1977). Coral and Jim Lorenzen examine eight alien abduction cases and find a
pattern of aliens seeking cultural knowledge about humans. They seem
particularly interested in learning more about human emotions. The Lorenzen’s
warn that every human on the planet is a potential kidnap victim.
—RANDALL FITZGERALD
abduction The phenomenon of forcible, involuntary capture of a human being

by an apparently self-serving alien, generally of the “Gray” morphology, but
also including “Nordic” and reptilian types. Those who have experienced this
may be termed “abductees” or “experiencers,” and often report strong feelings
of violation, trauma, and terror. Abduction scenarios commonly include
missing time, transfer to a new locale, physical examination and implantation,
and human-alien hybridization. It is a global phenomenon, but appears more
commonly in American ET contact cases.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1994). With this book Harvard University professor of psychiatry John E. Mack
became the most reputable figure in science or medicine to profess a belief in
the reality of the alien abduction phenomenon. He put seventy-six abductees
through hypnosis, including thirteen persons whose cases are used in this book,
and found consistent patterns in their accounts down to tiny details. The
purpose of these abductions and the collection of eggs and sperm from
abductees seems to be “genetic engineering for the purpose of creating
human/alien hybrid offspring.” Another goal of this alien program is the
alteration of human consciousness to change our perceptions of ourselves as a
species.
Abduction Transcription Project In 1992, Dan Wright (Deputy Director for
the Mutual UFO Network) devised the Abduction Transcription Project on
MUFON’s behalf. Project participants over the next six years included twenty
psychiatrists, psychologists, and others who recorded regressive hypnosis
sessions to elicit memories of alien abduction. A corps of MUFON volunteers
ultimately transcribed 930 audio cassettes, involving 265 separate cases, to
promote advanced research.
Wright created a 300-page index of key words and phrases from those
sessions—some 2000-plus separate elements. The entries described entity
appearances, actions and communications; details of the interior and exterior of
alien ships viewed during abduction experiences; medical equipment,
instruments and procedures employed; resulting physical effects on the
subjects’ anatomies; and particular psychic abilities and other paranormal
events seemingly related to the abduction episodes.
At the 1997 MUFON International UFO Symposium, Wright offered an
overview of his findings to that point regarding 254 abduction cases. His
conclusions addressed five themes present in human-alien interactions:
SEX AND REPRODUCTION
1) Various entity types have a keen interest in human sexuality and reproduction.
This is evidenced by a preponderance of instances involving the harvesting of
human male sperm; removal of ova and/or uterine tissue from human females as
well as the implantation of embryos and later removal of partially gestated
fetuses; forced intercourse between the subjects and entities or other human
captives; maintenance of “nurseries” onboard with gestation receptacles and/or
newborns; and forced breast feeding of “hybrid” and other newborns.
DUAL IDENTITY
2) A substantial share of abductees sense an “alien connection” from a realm

ostensibly outside this conscious life. Attendant to this conviction is a certainty
of protection against untimely death, an entity’s conveyance that the subject is
“special” or “chosen,” or an episode in which the individual seemingly realizes
she or he is in a nonhuman form in the company of entities with similar
appearance.
SENSE OF MISSION
3) Many abductees relate being told by aliens of a “mission” to perform at some
unspecified future time and/or having received technical instruction. They relate
episodes of memorizing ambiguous computer graphics, learning specifics of an
alien ship’s technical operations, and/or being told that they will intuitively know
where to be at a point in time to begin an unexplained assignment.
WORLD CATASTROPHES
4) A substantial share of the abduction subjects describe an impending

geophysical disaster to befall the Earth, as shown or told to them aboard a ship.
Predominant among that cataclysmic imagery are a tilting of Earth’s axis and/or
earthquakes and volcanoes unprecedented in scope within recorded history, vast
regions of the landscape on fire, and massive tidal waves inundating coastlines.
MILITARY INVOLVEMENT
5) A disturbing number of subjects in the project claim the U.S. military-

intelligence apparatus is directly involved in, or has acquiesced in, an alien
program of human abductions. They report (a) underground alien or shared
government-alien facilities; (b) military personnel acting in concert with alien
beings; and/or (c) military personnel abducting them, or aerial harassment by
unmarked helicopters of their homes, in the aftermath of alien abductions.
Based on the repetition of unpublicized details arising in the transcripts he
has reviewed, Wright concludes that human abductions by alien life forms are a
reality. He is confidant that the various entity types described arise from
multiple places and are not necessarily all working in concert. Short of a
startling admission by one or more governments on our planet, he doubts that
the full truth of alien intrusion can ever be known.
—ETEP STAFF
POSTSCRIPT: While “abductionists” such as Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and

Harvard University’s Dr. John Mack have achieved fame (and fortune) as experts
on the UFO-abduction phenomenon, the efforts of little-known researcher Dan
Wright have provided more scientifically useful insights into the true nature of
the phenomenon than all other abductionists combined. Wright heads a MUFON
(Mutual UFO Network) committee which painstakingly transcribes the tales told
by abductees—typically under hypnosis—which Wright then analyzes in a
search for patterns. The results of Wright’s latest analysis were reported at
MUFON’s recent conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Wright’s latest analysis is based on 906 taped transcripts of 254 alleged
abductions obtained from 20 abduction researchers. These included David
Jacobs, but Budd Hopkins and John Mack did not participate. Wright’s recent
report reveals a significant gender pattern. Of the 254 subjects, 64 percent were
female, 30 percent were male and 6 percent involved couples.
During the supposed abductions, 54 percent of the female subjects reported
being subjected to some gynecological procedure. Of these, 19 percent reported
having a fetus aborted, while 7 percent reported having an embryo implanted in
their womb. Nearly a third reported having ova or tissue removed. (But 46
percent reported no ET interest in such matters.)
The transcripts also revealed that 32 percent of the male subjects reported
having sperm extracted, or implied that such had occurred. (Seemingly, more
than two-thirds of the male abductees failed to meet ET standards to “father” a
hybrid.
4 percent of the female subjects reported being forced to engage in sexual
intercourse with ETs, one by a “short greenish-brown reptilian” who was trying
to arouse her with its “metal claws.” One male subject reported being forced to
engage in sex with another male abductee.
11 percent of the female subjects reported they had breast-fed a hybrid baby,
even though none of them had been pregnant or lactating at the time.
17 percent reported one or more of the following: underground government,
alien, or shared government-alien facilities; government personnel acting in
concert with alien beings; government intrusion or harassment during an alien
abduction.
WRIGHT’S CONCLUSIONS
Although Wright acknowledges his belief in the reality of UFO abductions,

he offers a wise caveat. “Regressive hypnosis, the cornerstone of the Abduction
Transcription Project, offers only evidence—not proof—of alien abductions.
Some of the people in the study might have a penchant for fantasies or a need
to be part of an exclusive ‘club.’ Moreover, many were less than carte blanche
subjects, having read one or more abduction-related books prior to undergoing
hypnosis sessions.”
What convinces Wright of the reality of UFO abductions are the “details,
sequences, cause and effect. These to the author are the proofs of an alien
abduction reality.”
He cites the following as an example: “Dozens of subjects said they were
shown one or more infants or a room full of incubating fetuses. But, if these
were only copycat images, how is it that each person placed the ‘baby’
presentation sequentially after—never before—procedures on an examining
table. No book or TV documentary has emphasized that.” However, this author
suggests the contrary: that overall, most contemporary books and TV shows
essentially do follow the traditional scenario with the examination first.
Possibly Wright’s most significant commentary appears early in his
MUFON paper: “Regressive hypnosis cannot irrefutably uncover truth
stemming from significant events in one’s life. Whether such episodes entail
emotional or sexual abuse, a fanciful personality, or some other prosaic
explanation, the subjects in this project nonetheless have concluded that
unearthly beings are responsible for their recovered memories. Further, in that
there are no conclusive means to discern fact from fiction in their recorded
accounts, no greater weight is given to a particular case over any other.”
Thus, it is impossible to determine from the content of the tales whether all
254 abduction accounts are literally true, or if some are true and some are
fantasy—or if all are fantasy. No “abductee” claim is so wild as to prompt
Wright to label it as fantasy.
—PHILIP J. KLASS
abductions Also known as Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (CE-IV

events), these experiences typically include: (1) capture by alien beings, (2)
time spent aboard a spaceship, and (3) bizarre, sometimes gruesome medical
examinations.
Abduction reports are relative newcomers to UFO lore. John G. Fuller
introduced the story of Barney and Betty Hill in his book, The Interrupted
Journey, in 1966, making the Hill case the prototypical and most familiar
abduction—though not the first on record.
Brazilian farmer, Antonio Villas Boas, described an abduction to UFOlogists
in early 1958, but they suppressed his report because of the sensationalistic
claim that an alien woman seduced him. The Villas Boas and Hill cases share
significant points in common even though neither case could have influenced
the other. Subsequent witnesses have claimed abduction dates in the 1950s and
earlier, but the Villas Boas and Hill reports were the first documented accounts.
Despite the popularity of Fuller’s book, abduction accounts remained scarce
for many years. Herbert Schirmer received some media attention in 1967; and
in 1973, a report from Pascagoula, Mississippi, made the national news when
two shipyard workers, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, reported they had
been captured by three mummy-like beings.
Then in November of 1975, Travis Walton of Snowflake, Arizona,
disappeared for five days and returned with an abduction story destined for
national notoriety.
After the mid-1970s a growing trickle of people stepped forward to describe
fragmentary, half-hidden memories of troubling UFO encounters. Coral and
Jim Lorenzen, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, Dr. James Harder, Raymond Fowler, Walter
Webb, Ann Druffel, Jenny Randles, D. Scott Rogo and other investigators
began to specialize in these reports. With the help of hypnotists they sometimes
recovered abduction accounts from an hour or two when the witness’s memory
failed.
A breakthrough came late in the decade when Budd Hopkins teamed with
professional hypnotists to explore periods of memory lapse connected not just
with sightings of mysterious lights but with less specific experiences, such as a
stretch of roadway or a childhood recollection that provoked unaccountable
anxieties. Where he found a memory gap, he often discovered an abduction,
and this new realization that the phenomenon spread further than anyone
suspected became the central message of his first book, Missing Time (1981).
Throughout the 1980s, the abduction phenomenon continued to rise to the
forefront of UFOlogy. Investigation of Betty Andreasson uncovered not just
one event but a lifelong series of alien encounters extending back into her
childhood.
Another account, from the Tujunga Canyon area of California, led to the
discovery of a series of abductions among five female acquaintances. In his
second book, Intruders (1987), Hopkins told of a young Indianapolis woman
being impregnated by aliens who removed the fetus, then later during another
abduction introduced her to the child—a human-alien hybrid.
Author Whitley Strieber proved the famous were vulnerable as well and
spread awareness of abductions further than ever before with his bestselling
book, Communion (1987).
Strieber’s “visitor” became an icon
after its appearance in 1987
on the cover of Communion.
Some 300 cases had entered the literature by 1985, followed by another 500
over the next six years. An OMNI magazine survey in December 1987 drew
some 1,200 responses from people describing abductions or abduction-like
symptoms, while a Roper Poll carried out in 1992 found abduction-related
experiences so common that a conservative extrapolation implicated some 2
percent of the U.S. population as likely abductees.
The subject attracted an increasingly distinguished scholarly following—
both for and against—during the 1990s. Historian Dr. David M. Jacobs turned
investigator and described the recurrent order he found among abductee
accounts in Secret Life (1992); he then proposed hybridization and eventual
alien domination of the earth to be the purpose behind these encounters in The
Threat (1998).
Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John E. Mack, also became an investigator
convinced that the phenomenon is literally true, but found it benign: an
interaction working to change human consciousness from materialism to a
more spiritual orientation. He published his findings in Abduction (1994) and
underwent a university-sponsored investigation by colleagues who suspected
him of unscientific procedures.
Abductees, investigators, and researchers gathered for the Abduction Study
Conference Held at MIT in 1992: an attempt to synthesize accumulated
knowledge and plot future research summarized in the proceedings, Alien
Discussions (1994). Noted writer, C. D. B. Bryan, observed the conference and
presented his sympathetic impressions in Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
(1995).
Another trend of the decade has been a willingness of abductees to follow in
the footsteps of Whitley Strieber and tell their own stories in print. The list
includes Karla Turner, Katharina Wilson, Debbie Jordan, Travis Walton, Beth
Collings and Anna Jamerson. Abduction research has become an organized
subdiscipline of UFOlogy, with Budd Hopkins’s Intruders Foundation, John
Mack’s Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER), and the Fund
for UFO Research sponsoring programs to explore physical and psychological
clues to the nature of the phenomenon.
Most abduction reports originate in North America, but the phenomenon is
worldwide with South America, Britain, and Australia producing numerous
reports. A growing number of cases have emerged from continental Europe and
the former Soviet Union, while Africa and Asia have begun to contribute
reports as well.
Though most abductions involve a single witness, perhaps one fourth are
multiplewitness cases, with three or more individuals sometimes taken at once.
Abductees come from all walks of life, all levels of education, and all lines of
work. Males and females seem about equally prone to the experience.
Psychological tests of abductees have failed to uncover any overt mental illness
—though their profiles indicate some of the insecurities characteristic of crime
victims. Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of abductees is their age
distribution. Anyone from children to the elderly may be abducted, but by far
the most abductees are less than 35 years of age when first taken.
Hypnosis became standard operating procedure to probe a period of missing
time with Barney and Betty Hill, and this technique remains the most
successful way to lift amnesia or remove an apparent mental block and release
memories of an abduction experience. Some two-thirds to three-fourths of the
known cases have included this controversial procedure, though some
witnesses, such as Charles Hickson, recall everything clearly from the start.
In other instances lost memories return spontaneously within days, weeks, or
months; or emerge in dreams or nightmares. Many witnesses retain some
memories with hypnosis serving only to fill in minor details.
However the story emerges, the accounts seem remarkably alike. Reports
contain a maximum of eight episodes:
1) Capture. Alien beings capture a human to take aboard a spaceship.

2) Examination. The beings subject their captive to a medical examination.
3) Conference. A meeting, lecture, or schooling session follows.
4) Tour. The witness is treated to a sightseeing tour of the ship.
5) Otherworldly Journey. The beings fly the witness to an otherworldly
environment.
6) Theophany. The witness meets a divine being or has a religious experience.
7) Return. The witness returns to Earth and resumes normal activities.
8) Aftermath. Aftereffects of the abduction influence the witness for weeks
or years to come.
Complex order extends to the capture and examination episodes as well. The
capture scenario begins with some abductees taken while driving, usually in a
remote area; others while at home or in bed; still others while outdoors in the
open.
Aliens or their UFO first appear, then silence and stillness settle over the
physical world while abductees lose the will to resist and paralysis creeps over
their bodies. The beings float their captives to the ship or a beam of light draws
them up and they enter suddenly, with a momentary lapse of memory.
Once the examination begins, it also follows a set course as the witness
undresses and lies on a table, then the beings perform a manual examination
and an eye-like device scans the witness’s body. Instrumental procedures
follow, then the beings take samples of bodily materials and procedures
concerned with the reproductive organs, neurological system, and emotions or
behavior follow in sequence.
The neurological examination may include placing an implant within the
body, often the head region of the witness. One being stares into the eyes of the
witness at close range and for a prolonged period during the examination.
The beings usually communicate by telepathy and limit the conversation to
instructions until the examination is completed. A conference allowing for
some degree of talk may follow. This conference may simply extend the
behavioral examination and explore human reactions to projected images or
dramatic scenes.
In other cases a formal and distinct conference episode brings the witness
face-to-face with an alien for questions and answers or to a lecture hall to hear
some sort of lesson. The beings often warn of a time of tribulation ahead and
prophesy disasters to come, and may school the witness for an obscure mission
to be performed “when the time is right.”
In recent years some abductees have reported visits to a room filled with
fetuses floating in tanks, or being presented with a hybrid infant or child and
encouraged to hold, play with, or “nurture” it. If the witness travels with the
beings, the destination is otherworldly—but not necessarily another planet. A
short trip brings the ship to an underground or undersea location: a
subterranean world of great beauty but no sunlight, only a uniformly lighted
sky. If the other-world is another planet, it is often dark and desolate, showing
signs of ruin and destruction.
Three stages of aftereffects make up the aftermath episode. (1) Immediate
aftereffects last a week or so and include physical conditions such as reddened
eyes, sunburned skin, puncture wounds, dehydration, and nausea. (2)
Intermediate aftereffects follow in a week or so and are mostly psychological,
with nightmares and anxiety attacks being the most common. (3) Long-term
consequences may span years and include a major restructuring of the
abductee’s personality, for better or worse. Abductees may develop psychic
powers and experience paranormal events; in time they develop new interests
and habits leading to a change of careers and lifestyles. Further abductions are
common sequels.
Few reports contain every possible episode or every possible event within an
episode. Out of 300 reports, capture and examination were by far the most
common, while theophanies occurred in only six cases. A remarkable
consistency characterizes one report after another. Whenever an episode or
event occurs, it follows the prescribed order in most cases, despite the absence
of any logical obligation for a conference to always follow an examination or a
scan to precede sample-taking. The reasonable expectation that a fantasized
story would reflect the creative imagination and personal needs of the
storyteller is not realized in abduction accounts. Their fidelity to a fixed order
seems an integral part of the phenomenon.
The descriptive content also persists from report to report. The craft is
usually a thick disk with an examination room inside. This room has rounded
walls and a domed roof, a uniform fluorescence, and misty or heavy air
accompanied by a chilly temperature.
Doors often open out of nowhere and disappear when they close, leaving no
seam. Humanoids, humans, and monsters occupy the craft. Monsters are quite
rare and human-like entities appear in no more than a fourth of the crews. Most
occupants are humanoids, some tall and some short, but by far the majority
represents a single type: the “standard” humanoid.
This being is three to five feet tall and has a fetal appearance, with a large
rounded cranium tapering to a pointed chin and a face dominated by enormous
eyes that extend around the side of the head in a “wraparound” effect. The other
facial features are vestigial—the mouth is a mere hole or slit, the nose only air-
holes, the ears nonexistent or holes at most. The skin is usually gray and
fungus-like, as if never exposed to sunlight, and completely hairless.
Sexual distinctions are seldom reported and most of these beings seem
neuter. Some humanoids are robust but most appear frail, sometimes with
unusually thin necks and long arms. They walk with stiff or clumsy steps but
more often glide or float, and use telepathy to communicate with captives. One
being is usually a little taller than the rest and serves as a leader or liaison, and
may become familiar to the abductee.
Though polite, the outward courtesy of the beings hides an innate coldness.
They show little concern or understanding for human feelings and care only for
accomplishing their mission.
A surrealistic atmosphere surrounds abduction, from the vacuum-like
cessation of sound and traffic at the beginning to the apparitions and Men in
Black that sometimes haunt abductees long after the encounter. The most
celebrated effect is time lapse, a loss of memory covering the period from the
early stages of capture until the abductee returns to a normal environment.
Another striking effect is the flotation many abductees report. They also
experience some sort of mental impairment while in captivity, an inappropriate
docility or peacefulness alternating with a sense of terror. The beings usually
exert something like a hypnotic influence to restore this unnatural tranquility
when it weakens, or accomplish an instant relief of pain with a touch on the
forehead.
Proponents of a physical phenomenon sometimes explain abduction as the
result of alien visitors satisfying their scientific curiosity. Another solution that
accepts alien visitors also takes into account the apparent large number of
abductions, the focus on reproduction, and the deceitfulness of the aliens to
conclude that they come from a planet in trouble. They face extinction and need
us or our planet to forestall their fate. By collecting eggs and sperm the aliens
gather the genetic materials necessary to reinvigorate their stock or hybridize
with earthlings, while any altruistic pose of preparing the earth for a future
catastrophe simply hides the true selfish purpose of abductions.
A more favorable viewpoint, expressed in various ways by Sprinkle,
Strieber, Mack, Kenneth Ring, John Keel, and Jacques Vallee, takes into
account the baffling, surreal, seemingly paraphysical aspects of the
phenomenon and interprets abduction as an effort of aliens or a cosmic mind to
alter human consciousness. The effort may proceed with benign intent or with
blind indifference, but the end result is a fundamental reordering of human
thought, perhaps an acceptance of cosmic citizenship, perhaps a new sense of
unity for humans with earth and cosmos, or perhaps merely a change with no
clear direction.
Skeptics note that abductions resemble fairy legends and near-death
experiences. These similarities suggest a psychological source underlying the
story content. Dr. Alvin Lawson experimented with non-abductees who told
abduction-like stories when questioned under hypnosis and proposed that
abduction content originates in memory of the birth experience. Other doubters
blame hypnosis, pointing out that a hypnotized subject is highly suggestible and
responds to cues from investigators eager to find an abduction.
Leading UFO debunker, Philip J. Klass, argues that subjects familiar with
media portrayals of abduction either fabricate the story or fantasize the
narrative in response to leading questions. The possibility that false memory
syndrome provokes accusations of child abuse and satanic ritual abuse, as well
as abduction claims, has generated an extensive literature of psychological and
skeptical commentary during the 1990s.
Comparative study leaves no explanation entirely satisfactory. The skeptics
who blame hypnosis must explain the cases retrieved without its help, while the
order and details in the reports seem to recur too often for passing familiarity to
explain. The tenaciousness of a single order and similar descriptions in report
after report defies the usual process of variation characteristic of folk narratives
or personal fantasies.
Abduction reports also demonstrate a deep coherency, since the aliens
manifest an interest in reproduction at the same time as they explain outright
that their planet has lost its fertility. Anyone with a casual knowledge of the
abduction story might pick up these clues. Yet the reports also include a
preference for youthful captives, rejection of the old or infertile as unsuitable,
the devastation of the otherworld, and the unhealthy appearance of the beings
themselves.
Pieces of the puzzle interlock into a meaningful picture, although this is not
immediately evident. Rather, a meaningful whole appears only after comparing
many more cases than most people ever examine. The same themes appear in
various guises to reinforce the verisimilitude of the abduction story, and a
coherent picture is undeniable.
On the other hand, aliens advanced enough to create hybrids but obliged to
steal the raw materials to do so seem implausible. With all the implants,
missing fetuses, and aliens on patrol that abduction claims require, lack of
creditable physical evidence that can be unequivocally connected to alien
beings raises doubts as well.
The mysteries of human memory and suggestibility open other paths to
explore before the reality of abduction claims become acceptable. In any
balanced evaluation the issue of abductions remains far from resolution.
—THOMAS EDDIE BULLARD
References
Bryan, C. D. B. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at
M.I.T. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Druffel, Ann, and D. Scott Rogo. The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (Prentice-Hall, 1980).
Fuller, John. The Interrupted Journey (Dial Press, 1966).
Hopkins, Budd. Missing Time (Richard Marek, 1981).
________. Intruders (Random House, 1987).
Jacobs, David M. Secret Life (Simon & Schuster, 1992).
________. The Threat (Simon & Schuster, 1998).
Jordan, Debbie, and Kathy Mitchell. Abducted! The Story of the Intruders Continues...(Carroll & Graf,
1994).
Klass, Philip J. UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Prometheus Books, 1988).
Mack, John E. Abducted (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).
Ring, Kenneth. The Omega Project. (William Morrow, 1992).
Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs. (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
Walton, Travis. Fire in the Sky (Marlowe, 1996).
Wilson, Katharina. The Alien Jigsaw (Puzzle Publishing, 1993-1995).
Above Top Secret (Sidgwick and Jackson/William Morrow, 1987). British

researcher Timothy Good summarizes or reprints UFO reports and government
documents from ten nations in an attempt to prove a massive worldwide cover-
up of the truth about UFOs. Good also spends a chapter trying to rehabilitate
the reputation and credibility of Frank Scully, whose book in 1950 claimed that
a spacecraft with alien bodies crashed in New Mexico.
Adamski, George (1891-1965). A Polish immigrant, without formal

education, who was the first to widely publicize his alleged contacts with
people from outer space. His bestselling book, Flying Saucers Have Landed
(coauthored with Desmond Leslie), and its sequels, made him the best-known
of all the “contactees,” several dozen of which followed his lead.
He is described by his disciples (the present-day George Adamski
Foundation, based in Vista, California) as a (former) “author-lecturer on
Unidentified Flying Objects, space travel, Cosmic Philosophy and Universal
Laws of Life.” As a child, Adamski is said to have had a deep feeling of
reverence for nature and to have often pondered great philosophical questions
about the interrelationship between the rest of nature and man. He was often
referred to in written accounts as “Professor” Adamski, which he said was an
honorary title bestowed upon him by his students. However, a significant
portion of the general public was misled into believing that he was an
accredited scientist.
George Adamski
According to Frank Edwards, writing in Flying Saucers—Here and Now!

(1967): “Prior to becoming associated with a hamburger stand on the road to
Mount Palomar, George had worked in a hamburger stand as a grill cook. With
this scientific background he wrote, in his spare time, a document which he
called An Imaginary Trip to the Moon, Venus and Mars. He voluntarily listed it
with the Library of Congress for copyright purposes as a work of fiction.”
Edwards claims to have read the manuscript, which he said was later offered, in
revised form, as a factual account of Adamski’s contact experiences.
Jerome Clark reports a similar story in his book The Unidentified (co-
authored with Loren Coleman): “Ray Palmer has maintained for years that back
in 1946, when he edited Amazing Stories, he rejected a manuscript Adamski
had submitted. The story, which did not pretend to be anything but fantasy,
concerned Jesus Christ’s landing on earth in a spaceship. In 1953, when Palmer
read Flying Saucers Have Landed, he was amazed to discover that the new
story was really the old one updated, with Jesus now a Venusian and the
spaceship a flying saucer.” (Clark and Coleman, 1975)
Adamski claimed to have seen his first “spaceship” on October 9, 1946, over
his California home in Palomar Gardens. It was a dirigible-shaped “Mother
Ship,” he said, which carried the smaller “flying saucers,” or “Scout craft,”
inside. Then in August of 1947, 184 saucers allegedly passed over the slopes of
Palomar again, as Adamski watched.
It was not until November 20, 1952, that the first face-to-face meeting
reportedly occurred between Adamski and his “space friends,” as he sometimes
called them. The location of this historic event was said to be near Desert
Center, in the California desert. Also present were six witnesses who later
signed a sworn affidavit. A detailed account of the incident, in which Adamski
meets Orthon, a man from Venus, appears in Flying Saucers Have Landed
(1953).
Briefly, the supposed event can be described as follows: Orthon’s saucer
descends from a huge “Mother Ship,” hovering high above. After landing on a
nearby hill, the Venusian walks over to Adamski, who remains calm and cool
throughout the entire episode. Orthon was described as smooth-skinned,
beardless, and well dressed. He had shoulder-length blond hair, was about five
feet six inches tall, and wore what looked like a ski suit with a broad belt
around the waist.
The Venusian began communicating by telepathy, informing Adamski of the
Space Peoples’ friendly intentions and concern over “radiations from our
nuclear tests.” It was made clear to George that we earthlings had better start
living according to the laws of the “Creator of All,” which, of course, had been
taught all along by “Professor” Adamski. After about one hour had elapsed,
Orthon returned to his ship and buzzed away.
Cover art from Adamski’s first book,

Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953)
Many more contacts were to follow, including rides into space and lengthy
dialogues with other spacemen (such as Firkon, a Martian, and Ramu, a
Saturnian), which were recounted verbatim—without a tape recorder—in
Adamski’s second book Inside the Space Ships (1955).
Back on Earth, Adamski was in great demand for lectures, radio and TV
appearances, as well as countless interviews for newspapers and magazines. He
toured the world, speaking to millions of people, and was reportedly granted
private audiences with Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and Pope John XXIII.
In October, 1957, UFO researcher James W. Moseley (now editor of Saucer
Smear, formerly Saucer News) published a damaging exposé of Adamski’s
claims, based on personal interviews with Adamski and most of his close
friends and co-workers. Among other interesting tidbits, Moseley made the
following points:
1. Adamski’s first book misquoted a number of people regarding statements
they supposedly made in support of his claims.
2. The six “witnesses” at the November 20, 1952, “Desert Contact” all had
backgrounds as UFO believers, had no special expertise, and did not see
enough detail to vouch for the reality of the incident. Some of them later
admitted this.
3. The “Desert Contact” was not accidental as claimed, but was pre-planned
from detailed information and instructions that Adamski tape recorded and
played for several co-workers, about a week before the incident took place.
4. In a letter to a close friend, which Moseley obtained, Adamski wrote:
“Sometimes you have to use the back door to get the Truth across.”
On Adamski’s behalf, it can be said that he was trying to get across certain
truths—regardless of whether they were coming from the “space brothers” or
ancient philosophers on Earth. As one reads Inside the Space Ships, especially,
what is strikingly evident are the obvious metaphors on every page. This may
be the point that Desmond Leslie intended in the foreword to the book when he
said: “We are in no position to sit and split hairs when the very foundations of
this planet are teetering on disaster. Read, then, the following with an open
mind and see whether the light of its teaching rings true.” (Adamski, 1955)
To a Jungian, Adamski’s tour of the space ship becomes a treasure trove of
technological metaphors coinciding with virtually every principle of mystical
truth found in the philosophica perennis—or Perennial Philosophy—and in the
Holy Bible: the all-seeing “Eye of God,” warnings about idolatry, the
importance of self-knowledge, warnings about egotism and self-seeking,
respect for natural law and the need for harmony with nature, respect for the
planet and other life-forms, unity and altruism, the reconciliation of opposites,
microcosm and macrocosm, oneness with the universe, death and rebirth, the
law of balance, karma and the Golden Rule, and cosmic understanding, in
general.
Examples of technological metaphors include: light as enlightenment; a
giant lens as the “Eye of God”; the power of the space ship as the power of the
mind; space travel as ascension; the secrets of space travel as the secrets of life;
interplanetary travel as connecting the “gods” (for which the planets were
named), which can be interpreted as integrating the potentialities within us; the
speed of light as the speed of truth (or thought); and telepathy as a symbol for
total honesty.
As sociologist David Stupple cleverly pointed out, Adamski and most of the
other leading contactees of the 1950s were utopians. “George Adamski had a
vision of a better world, and that vision apparently became reality for him.”
(Stupple, 1980)
After a successful twelve years as a famous celebrity, Adamski died of a
heart attack on April 23, 1965, in Washington, D.C.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Adamski, George and Leslie, Desmond. Flying Saucers Have Landed (The British Book Centre/Werner
Laurie, 1953).
________. Inside the Space Ships (Abelard-Schuman, 1955).
Clark, Jerome and Coleman, Loren. The Unidentified (Warner Paperback Library, 1975).
Edwards, Frank. Flying Saucers—Here and Now! (Lyle Stuart, 1967).
Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Brothers, 1945).
Moseley, James W. Personal communication, February 14, 2000.
Stupple, David. “The Man Who Talked with Venusians” in Proceedings of the First International UFO
Congress, edited by Curtis G. Fuller (Warner Books, 1980).
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) APRO was founded

in January 1952 by a Wisconsin couple, Jim (Leslie James) and Coral E.
Lorenzen who later moved to Alamogordo, New Mexico, and finally to
Tucson, Arizona, where the organization was based until it was dissolved in
1988.
The organization was based on the premise that the UFO phenomenon is
important enough to warrant an objective, scientific investigation. Toward this
end APRO became a pacesetter in many ways.
APRO was the first organization of its kind in the world in that it always
maintained representatives in most foreign countries who kept headquarters in
Tucson informed concerning UFO activity around the globe. About 10 percent
of its membership were outside the United States.
In 1956, APRO began to recruit scientific personnel to investigate and
evaluate cases, rather than depend on newspaper clippings as source material. A
Field Investigators Network, composed of selected APRO members was spread
across North America and extending overseas. These members investigated
UFO cases and forwarded the results to headquarters. The advice of APRO’s
consultants in their various fields of specialization was relied upon to indicate
appropriate areas and direction of research.
The general membership would furnish leads to be referred to Field
Investigators for follow-up. Current UFO reports, results of various projects,
editorial commentaries and other features were carried in the monthly APRO
Bulletin. The first issue of the APRO Bulletin was published in June 1952 and
ran through most of 1987.
In 1957, APRO began building its international staff as well as its scientific
consulting staff. At one time, the organization had forty-two scientists on its
consulting panels—listed under four general categories: biological, medical,
physical, and social sciences—and foreign representatives in forty-seven
different countries.
APRO proved to be a pacesetter in other areas as well. The concept of
specially selected Field Investigators originated with APRO, and in 1971 it was
the first private UFO research organization to sponsor a scientific symposium
on UFOs.
In 1968, APRO initiated the Field Investigator Network system, which was
later adopted by both MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and CUFOS (the
Center for UFO Studies).
In 1970, APRO published the first Field Investigator’s manual. The first
UFO Conference was held in Peoria, Illinois in 1970, sponsored by APRO and
the local Peoria Research Group. MUFON surfaced the same year when its
leader, Walt Andrus, decided that he wanted his own group.
APRO enjoyed considerable success during the late 1960s while UFOs were
leading law enforcement officers and the general public in a merry chase that
resulted in the appointment of the Condon Committee, under contract to the
U.S. Air Force.
When the Condon Committee closed its doors and issued its final report in
1968, the Air Force followed suit and announced its disengagement with the
UFO problem in December 1969.
The last large UFO research group came upon the scene in 1973, when Dr, J.
Allen Hynek founded the Center for UFO Studies. Between 1963 and 1973, Dr.
Hynek contacted the top men in the UFO field around the world and to
establish the nucleus of CUFOS. Both MUFON and CUFOS are similar to
APRO in their organizational structure and methodology.
Perhaps most significantly, APRO was a pacesetter in the overall modern
trend in UFOlogy relating to close encounters of the third and fourth kinds
(CE-3s and CE-4s): entities and abductions. From the time the first cases were
publicized in the 1960s, APRO supported the idea of UFO “occupants” or
“entities,” as the Lorenzens called them, while rejecting most “contactee”
claims.
—ETEP STAFF
Aetherius Society An international metaphysical, scientific, and religious

organization, the Aetherius Society was founded in London, England, in 1956
by Dr. George King, Ph.D. (1919-1997). The American headquarters (in
California) was established in 1960, and there are other branches in Detroit,
Australia, West Africa, and throughout the British Isles.
The society bases its beliefs upon the contact Dr. King is said to have had
with highly evolved “Masters” on other planets—mostly within this solar
system—and the more than six hundred communications, or “Transmissions,”
he has allegedly received from them. King claims that he was first contacted,
one morning in May 1954, by a “voice from space” that said. “Prepare
yourself! You are to become the Voice of Interplanetary Parliament.” Thus, the
thirty-five-year-old Englishman became the “Primary Terrestrial Mental
Channel” by authority of the voice which (he later discovered) belonged to a
thirty-five-hundred-year-old Venusian Master called Aetherius (a pseudonym
meaning “One Who comes from Outer Space”). Aetherius and other members
of the “Hierarchy of the Solar System” had an urgent message to give to Earth
through the unique Yogic mediumship of George King, and in 1955 a series of
“Cosmic Transmissions” began, which continued throughout his life.
To receive them, King would go into a samadhic trance in which the
consciousness is supposedly raised to a high “Psychic Center.” A telepathic
beam of thought was placed on him by the communicator, and the message was
received and transmitted through King’s brain and voice box, emerging in the
form of slow-spoken, resonant English. All messages are preserved on audio
tape.
The messages include warnings against the use of nuclear energy in any
form and exhortations to put the world in order by returning to the “Cosmic
Laws” as taught by great Masters such as Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna—all of
whom are said to have come from other planets.
Life on the other planets is described as free from war, hatred, disease, want,
and ignorance. The inhabitants have perfected spacecraft that can traverse the
galaxy and beyond. Some of these craft, engaged in metaphysical operations
around the Earth, have been termed “flying saucers.”
Among their supposed missions were the following: to protect us from
outside interference from hostile races, to monitor all changes in the
environment and geophysical structure of the planet, and to help clear up
harmful radiation in the atmosphere.
King stated that without flying saucers the world would be lifeless.
Messages from the commanders of some of the craft indicate that mankind is
the “problem child” of the solar system and an area of vulnerability in an
otherwise well-protected sector of the galaxy. This is of special importance to
the Aetherius Society in view of its belief that an intergalactic conflict is now in
progress.
The society also believes in reincarnation and teaches that mankind itself
originally came from another planet in this solar system, which is now the
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Our original home planet is said to have
been destroyed by a total atomic chain reaction, and mankind was reincarnated
on Earth some 18 million years ago.
According to the society’s beliefs, two previous civilizations on Earth,
Lemuria and Atlantis, also perished due to an atomic war, and the Cosmic
Masters are now actively concerned with preventing a third such catastrophe. It
is further maintained that specially trained interplanetary Adepts are on Earth
engaged in a cleansing operation to eliminate the centers of evil, which have
dominated the world for eons and seek to eventually enslave all of mankind.
The plan will culminate with the arrival of an extraterrestrial Master from a
flying saucer some time in the not-too-distant future. When this happens, all
people on Earth will be offered the choice of following the laws of God and
entering a New Age of peace and enlightenment, or rejecting the laws and
passing through death to a younger planet where they will relearn the lessons of
life.
The Aetherius Society has published many texts of the Transmissions and
also produces a full range of cassette tapes explaining the theory and practice of
Cosmic metaphysics. The society organizes lectures, seminars, and other events
to publicize the Teachings of the Cosmic Masters.
6202 Afton Place

Hollywood, CA 90028 U.S.A.
757 Fulham Road
Address:
London SW6 6UU
England
Web site: www.aetherius.org

AFR (Air Force Regulation) 190-1 Issued on August 30, 1991, by the
Secretary of the United States Air Force to update the official USAF policy on
Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs):
a. The following statement may be used in response to queries: Project Blue
Book, the Air Force study of UFOs, ended in 1969, after 22 years of scientific
investigation. More than 12,500 reported sightings were investigated; the vast
majority—about 95 percent—were explainable. They were caused by such
natural phenomena as meteors, satellites, aircraft, lightning, balloons, weather
conditions, reflections of other planets, or just plain hoaxes. Of the very few
that remained unexplained, there was no indication of a technology beyond our
own scientific knowledge, or that any sighting could be considered an
extraterrestrial vehicle. Most importantly, throughout Project Blue Book, there
was never a shred of evidence to indicate a threat to our national security.
Project Blue Book was ended based on these findings, as verified by a scientific
study prepared by the University of Colorado, and further verified by the
National Academy of Sciences. All of the Project Blue Book materials were
turned over to the Modern Military Branch, National Archives and Records
Administration, 8th Street and Pennsylvania, Wash DC 20408, and are
available for public review and analysis.
b. Individuals alleging current sighting[s] should be referred, without
comment, to local law enforcement officials.
—U.S. AIR FORCE
airship wave of 1896 The first major UFO wave in recorded history took
place in 1896 (several years prior to any officially documented flights of
airplanes or powered airships of any kind in the United States), beginning in
November, with reports mostly confined to the state of California but involving
also Washington State and Canada to a lesser degree.
This woodcut appeared in an 1896 newspaper

to illustrate the phantom “airship” that
was seen before its time.
A mystery light was first reported in the night sky over the capitol city of
Sacramento on the evening of November 17, 1896. Local newspapers ran such
headlines as: A WANDERING APPARITION, A QUEER PHENOMENON,
and WHAT WAS IT? It was said that due to a heavy overcast on the evening of
the first sighting, very little detail could be observed. The majority of alleged
witnesses reported only a light source, but a few were said to have seen, in
addition, a dark body of some sort above the luminous point (according to
newspaper accounts).
The strange flying light appeared a second time, so the story goes, on the
evening of November 21st, at which time the public and press are said to have
taken the phenomenon much more seriously. Reportedly, witnesses to the
second passage included a sizable number of the citizens of Sacramento, but, as
before, a dark, cloudy sky masked any detail that would explain how the light
was being carried through the atmosphere.
Soon after the light passed out of sight, it was reportedly seen over the city
of Folsom, some twenty miles to the west. Later that night, reports of lights in
the heavens came in from the San Francisco Bay area.
Unexplained flying lights and the story of the sighting of an airship by one
R. L. Lowry prompted a San Francisco attorney to “disclose” that a man had
supposedly contacted him some months earlier for legal advice concerning the
“world’s first practical airship,” a craft that the supposed inventor asserted he
had nearly completed. Flashing impressive blueprints and boasting of strong
financial backing, the inventor convinced the attorney that the airship would
soon be operational. The attorney, a George D. Collins, told the press that, in
his opinion, the phenomenon in the skies over Sacramento must have been his
client conducting nocturnal test flights before making an official announcement
of his secret invention. This suggestion, a reasonable one in the minds of many,
was given extensive publicity by San Francisco newspapers, stirring up
imaginations all over California. Rumors and wild stones soon began to spread.
For a while, the. ”phantom airship” was the biggest news story in northern
California.
As more reports of strange lights in the sky were tallied, enhancing the
mystery, attorney Collins became so tormented by reporters and curious
busybodies that he regretted his earlier bragging and fled into hiding.
Cities reporting airship sightings after November 23 included Stockton,
Lathrop, Sebastopol, Santa Rosa, Red Bluff, Chico, Auburn, San Jose,
Modesto, Woodland, Fresno, Visalia, Hanford, Bakersfield, Tulare, Delano, Los
Angeles, Redlands, and Anderson.
As to the exact nature of the mystery light, many reports were vague,
mentioning only a bright light in the western sky early in the evening,
indicating possible confusion with the planet Venus. Reported velocities of the
light as it passed overhead were slow by modern standards, and if one considers
the testimony of a number of witnesses that the light moved in an undulating
fashion, this might indicate that some sightings were due to wind-blown
balloons with a lantern attached. Again, some witnesses said they saw
something large supporting the light but very few details were given. The most
common terms used to describe the “supporting structure” were: “dark body,”
“misty mass,” “cigar-shaped,” “egg-shaped,” and “barrel-shaped.”
In spite of the difficulties involved, about a half-dozen reports can be
explained satisfactorily. These were the sightings of three strange fights in the
heavens a month before the passage of the mystery light (or lights) over
Sacramento. There is a good possibility that people were confusing the
“phantom airship” with the passage of a triple-headed bolide that had crossed
the night sky with majestic slowness several weeks previously.
However, all things considered, there were still some puzzling episodes that
took place in November 1896:
(1) A fiery object displaying three points of light was spotted resting on the
ground near Knight’s Ferry, California. Two witnesses, both Methodist
ministers, said the thing suddenly took off as they approached, flying away in a
shallow climb.
(2) A fast-moving cigar-shaped object surrounded by a shifting luminosity
and making small explosions was reported by the captain of a steamboat.
(3) According to hundreds of citizens of Tulare, California, of which fifteen
are named in news accounts, something in the night sky came down quite a
distance, and then went up and took a straight, quick move westward. Red,
white, and blue lights were seen in succession.
4) A resident of Tacoma, Washington, said he watched something strange in
the sky over Mount Rainier one night. For over an hour, he said, an object
emitted various colored rays, which shot out from the thing’s center in every
direction like spokes of a wheel. The “object” reportedly moved about with a
waving motion, swayed back and forth, and darted from one position to
another.
The Canadian press, which reported on the puzzling events taking place in
California, seemed to take the airship possibility very seriously, even though
one of the most intriguing reports of the year came from Rossland, British
Columbia, on August 12, 1896. It told of a strange aerial body that approached
the town, paused momentarily above a nearby mountain peak, made several
wide circles in the sky, and then sped away on a straight course. The thing was
described as a “luminous ball of fire that glowed amidst a halo of variegated
colors.” The object took a quarter of an hour to complete its maneuvers and
was watched by many citizens of Rossland.
It. is interesting to note that even back in 1896 the extraterrestrial hypothesis
was suggested by some to account for the appearance of the nineteenth-century
UFOs. In a letter to the editor of the Sacramento Bee, published in the
November 24th issue, one citizen who gave his initials as “W.A.” stated his
conviction that the observed phenomenon could only be due to the visit of a
spacecraft from the planet Mars on a mission of exploration. He expressed his
belief that the alien ship was made of very light metal and powered by some
sort of electrical force, giving the Martian vessel the appearance of a ball of fire
in flight. The speed of such an interplanetary craft he imagined to be a
“thousand miles a second.”
Perhaps even more intriguing is this early report of a “close encounter of the
third kind”: Two men told the Stockton Evening Mail that they had met three
“strange people” on a road near Lodi, California. According to the story, the
strange beings were very tall, with small delicate hands, and large, narrow feet.
Each creature’s head was bald with small ears and a small mouth, yet the eyes
were big and lustrous. Instead of clothing, the creatures seemed to be covered
with a natural silky growth. Conversation was impossible because the “strange
people” could only utter a monotonous, guttural, warbling. Occasionally, one of
the unusual beings would breathe deeply from a nozzle attached to a bag slung
under an arm and in each hand the creatures carried something the size of an
egg that gave off an intense light. The weird encounter ended with an attempted
kidnap of the two Californians, but failing to overpower the two men, the
creatures fled to a cigar-shaped craft hovering nearby, jumped through a hatch,
and zoomed away.
The California UFO wave of 1896 was over by December, but in February
of 1897 reports of mysterious starlike bodies moving about the skies over
western Nebraska marked the beginning of an even bigger UFO wave that
would involve the greater part of the American Midwest.
—LOREN E. GROSS
airship wave of 1897 The California airship reports of November and

December 1896, while recounted in some newspapers around the country,
attracted relatively little attention in the Midwest and East. The arrival of 1897
saw the end of the California flap, with only isolated sightings at Lodi and
Acampo in mid-January. Curiously enough, Delaware farmers, three thousand
miles away, also reported airships during January.
By mid-February, unknown craft and mysterious lights in the night skies
were reported in many areas of Nebraska. Sightings continued throughout
March, with reports now coming from neighboring Kansas as well. To the
north, in Michigan, late March brought stories of “balls of fire” moving through
the darkness.
On the night of March 29th, hundreds of people in Omaha watched a large
bright light fly over the city, hover briefly, then disappear to the northwest. An
even larger audience, numbering in the thousands, witnessed the performance
of an aerial mystery over Kansas City three nights later. In Everest, Kansas, the
object was described as resembling an Indian canoe, some twenty-five to thirty
feet in length, carrying a searchlight of varying colors.
The airships were generally described as cigar-shaped, apparently metallic,
with wings, propellers, fins, and other appendages. At night, they appeared to
be brilliant lights, with dark superstructures sometimes visible behind the
lights.
Skeptics searched in vain for a conventional explanation, blaming the
reports on the planet Venus (then brilliant in the evening sky) or the star Alpha
Orionis. The reports also inspired practical jokers, who began sending aloft
balloons of every description. The situation was further confused by
“enterprising” reporters who delighted in seeing who could concoct the tallest
airship tale for publication.
As the wave of reports continued throughout April, numerous stories of
landed airships were published in newspapers around the country. In many such
accounts, the operators of the craft were seen and communications were
established by the witnesses. The airship occupants were usually described as
normal-looking human beings who engaged their wondering admirers in
conversation. They generally claimed to be experimenting with aerial travel,
saying their craft had been constructed in secret in Iowa, New York, Tennessee,
or some other locality.
There were exceptions to this contact pattern, such as a report by Judge
Lawrence A. Byrne of Texarkana, Arkansas, who claimed to have met Oriental-
looking occupants of a landed airship. These beings, three in number, spoke
among themselves in a foreign language. They beckoned to Byrne, who went
aboard the craft and later described some of the machinery inside.
In one Texas case, the airship crewmen claimed to be from an unknown
region at the North Pole. A West Virginia report, only discovered in the late
1970s, tells of “Martians” aboard a grounded craft.
The people of 1897 did consider extraterrestrial explanations for the
airships. Loren Gross, in his entry on the California events of 1896, has referred
to a letter, published in the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee of November 24, 1896.
This was the first “Martian” speculation, but others followed. The Colony
(Kans.) Free Press, editorializing on the mystery, thought the airship was
“probably operated by a party of scientists from the planet Mars” Similar
theories of visitors from the Red Planet were mentioned in the St. Louis (Mo.)
Post-Dispatch, the Memphis (Tenn.) Commercial-Appeal, and other
newspapers of the period. The concept of life on Mars had already been
brought to public consciousness by the research and theories of such
astronomers as Percival Lowell and Camille Flammarion. Lowell’s ideas of the
Martian canals were well known, and Flammarion had speculated on possible
communication with the inhabitants of Mars.
Reports of airship sightings continued throughout May of 1897, with an
isolated sighting coming from Texas during June. This particular event was
noteworthy, as it told of two airships seen at the same time. Sightings of more
than one object were very rare, although the airships were seen in widely
separated areas on the same day. For instance, on April 15th, at the height of the
wave, reports came from ten different towns in Michigan, seven towns in
Illinois, and one location each in Iowa and South Dakota. It would be simple
enough to quote similar instances for virtually any day in April. Nor were such
sightings confined to only four states in one twenty-four-hour period, as in the
above example. It should be noted also that any such statistics are based on
incomplete research, as the newspaper files of several states remain virtually
untouched by investigators.
Hints of worldwide airship activity during 1897 are contained in reports
from Sweden on July 17th, off the coast of Norway on August 13th, and from
Ontario, Canada, on August 16th. In late September, an engineer in the town of
Ustyug, Russia, observed a “balloon” with an “electric,” or phosphorescent,
sheen. As a matter of historical fact, the British and the French were known to
have motor-powered balloons by this time, but the American airship reports
have never been satisfactorily explained. Aviation historians state that craft
such as were reported were not operational in the United States during the late
1890s. Were they, then, extraterrestrial vehicles? The descriptions hardly fit the
image of sleek, streamlined spaceships, designed for interplanetary voyages. To
say that the airships were from a “parallel universe,” or some equally esoteric
realm, is really no answer, but mere speculation. One is forced to admit that the
strangers in the skies of 1897 remain as much of a mystery to us as they were to
our ancestors.
—LUCIUS FARISH
alien autopsy film The Roswell crashed-saucer myth has been given renewed
impetus by a controversial television program called “Alien Autopsy: Fact or
Fiction?” that purports to depict the autopsy of a flying saucer occupant. The
“documentary,” promoted by a British marketing agency that formerly handled
Walt Disney products, was aired August 28 and September 4, 1995, on the Fox
television network. Skeptics, as well as many UFOlogists, quickly branded the
film used in the program a hoax.
“The Roswell Incident,” as it is known, is described in several controversial
books, including one of that title by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore.
Reportedly, in early July 1947, a flying saucer crashed on the ranch property of
William Brazel near Roswell, New Mexico, and was subsequently retrieved by
the United States government (Berlitz and Moore 1980). Over the years,
numerous rumors, urban legends, and outright hoaxes have claimed that saucer
wreckage and the remains of its humanoid occupants were stored at a secret
facility—e.g., a (nonexistent) “Hangar 18” at Wright Patterson Air Force Base
—and that the small corpses were autopsied at that or another site (Berlitz and
Moore, 1980; String-field, 1977).
UFO hoaxes, both directly and indirectly related to Roswell, have since
proliferated. For example, a 1949 science fiction movie, The Flying Saucer,
produced by Mikel Conrad, purported to contain scenes of a captured
spacecraft; an actor hired by Conrad actually posed as an FBI agent and swore
the claim was true. In 1950, writer Frank Scully reported in his book Behind the
Flying Saucers that the United States government had in its possession no
fewer than three Venusian spaceships, together with the bodies of their
humanoid occupants. Scully, who was also a Variety magazine columnist, was
fed the story by two confidence men who had hoped to sell a petroleum-
locating device allegedly based on alien technology. Other crash-retrieval
stories followed, as did various photographs of space aliens living and dead:
One gruesome photo portrayed the pilot of a small plane, his aviator’s glasses
still visible in the picture (Clark, 1993).
Among recent Roswell hoaxes was the MJ-12 fiasco, in which supposed top
secret government documents—including an alleged briefing paper for
President Eisenhower and an executive order from President Truman—
corroborated the Roswell crash. Unfortunately, document experts readily
exposed the papers as inept forgeries (Nickell and Fischer 1990).
Sooner or later, a Roswell “alien autopsy” film was bound to turn up. That
predictability, together with a lack of established historical record for the
bizarre film, is indicative of a hoax. So is the anonymity of the cameraman. But
the strongest argument against authenticity stems from what really crashed at
Roswell in 1947. According to recently released air force files, the wreckage
actually came from a balloon-borne array of radar reflectors and monitoring
equipment launched as part of the secret Project Mogul and intended to monitor
acoustic emissions from anticipated Soviet nuclear tests. In fact, materials from
the device match contemporary descriptions of the debris (foiled paper, sticks,
and tape) given by rancher Brazel’s children and others (Berlitz and Moore,
1980; Thomas, 1995).
Interestingly, the film failed to agree with earlier purported eyewitness
testimony about the alleged autopsy. For example, multiple medical informants
described the Roswell creatures as lacking ears and having only four fingers
with no thumb (Berlitz and Moore, 1980), whereas the autopsy film depicts a
creature with small ears and five fingers in addition to a thumb. Ergo, either the
previous informants are hoaxers, or the film is a hoax, or both.
Although the film was supposedly authenticated by Kodak, only the leader
tape and a single frame were submitted for examination, not the entire footage.
In fact, a Kodak spokesman told the Sunday Times of London: “There is no
way I could authenticate this. I saw an image on the print. Sure it could be old
film, but it doesn’t mean it is what the aliens were filmed on.”
Various objections to the film’s authenticity came from journalists, UFO
researchers, and scientists who viewed the film. They noted that it bore a
bogus, nonmilitary codemark (“Restricted access, AOI classification”) that
disappeared after it was criticized; that the anonymous photographer’s alleged
military status had not been verified; and that the injuries sustained by the
extraterrestrial were inconsistent with an air crash. On the basis of such
objections, an article in the Sunday Times of London advised: “RELAX. The
little green men have not landed. A much-hyped film purporting to prove that
aliens had arrived on earth is a hoax.” (Chittenden, 1995)
Similar opinions on the film came even from prominent Roswell-crash
partisans: Kent Jeffrey, an associate of the Center for UFO Studies and author
of the “Roswell Declaration” (a call for an executive order to declassify any
United States government information on UFOs and alien intelligence) stated
“up front and unequivocally there is no (zero!!!) doubt in my mind that this
film is a fraud.” (1995) Even arch Roswell promoter Stanton T. Friedman said:
“I saw nothing to indicate the footage came from the Roswell incident, or any
other UFO incident for that matter” (“Alien or Fake?” 1995).
Still other critics found many inconsistencies and suspicious elements in the
alleged autopsy. For example, in one scene the “doctors” wore white, hooded
anticontamination suits that could have been neither for protection from
radiation (elsewhere the personnel are examining an alien body without such
suits), nor for protection from the odor of decay or from unknown bacteria or
viruses (either would have required some type of breathing apparatus). Thus it
appears that the outfits served no purpose except to conceal the doctors’
identities.
American pathologists offered still more negative observations. Cyril Wecht,
former president of the National Association of Forensic Pathologists, seemed
credulous but described the viscera in terms that might apply to supermarket
meat scraps and sponges: “I cannot relate these structures to abdominal
contexts.” Again, he said about contents of the cranial area being removed:
“This is a structure that must be the brain, if it is a human being. It looks like no
brain that I have ever seen, whether it is a brain filled with a tumor, a brain that
has been radiated, a brain that has been traumatized and is hemorragic....
(Wecht, 1995) Much more critical was the assessment of nationally known
pathologist Dominick Demaio who described the autopsy on television’s
“American Journal” (1995): “I would say it’s a lot of bull.”
Houston pathologist Ed Uthman (1995) was also bothered by the unrealistic
viscera, stating: “The most implausible thing of all is that the ‘alien’ just had
amorphous lumps of tissue in ‘her’ body cavities. I cannot fathom that an alien
who had external organs so much like ours could not have some sort of
definitive structural organs internally.” As well, “the prosectors did not make an
attempt to arrange the organs for demonstration for the camera.” Uthman also
observed that there was no body block, a basic piece of equipment used to prop
up the trunk for examination and the head for brain removal. He also pointed
out that “the prosector used scissors like a tailor, not like a pathologist or
surgeon” (pathologists and surgeons place the middle or ring finger in the
bottom scissors hole and use the forefinger to steady the scissors near the
blades). Uthman further noted that “the initial cuts in the skin were made a little
too Hollywood-like, too gingerly, like operating on a living patient” whereas
autopsy incisions are made faster and deeper. Uthman faulted the film for
lacking what he aptly termed “technical verisimilitude.”
The degree of realism in the film has been debated, even by those who
believe the film is a hoax. Some, like Kent Jeffrey (1995), thought the autopsy
was done on a specially altered human corpse. On the other hand, many
including movie special effects experts believed a dummy had been used. One
suspicious point in that regard was that significant close-up views of the
creature’s internal organs were consistently out of focus (“Alien or Fake?”
1995).
“American Journal” (1995) also featured a special effects expert who
doubted the film’s authenticity and demonstrated how the autopsy
“incisions”—which left a line of “blood” as the scalpel was drawn across the
alien’s skin—could easily have been faked. (The secret went unexplained but
probably consisted of a tube fastened to the far side of the blade.)
In contrast to the somewhat credulous response of a Hollywood special
effects filmmaker on the Fox program, British expert Cliff Wallace of Creature
Effects provided the following assessment:
None of us were of the opinion that we were watching a real alien autopsy,
or an autopsy on a mutated human which has also been suggested. We all
agreed that what we were seeing was a very good fake body, a large
proportion of which had been based on a lifecast. Although the nature of the
film obscured many of the things we had hoped to see, we felt that the
general posture and weighting of the corpse was incorrect for a body in a
prone position and had more in common with a cast that had been taken in
an upright position.
We did notice evidence of a possible molding seam line down an arm in
one segment of the film but were generally surprised that there was little
other evidence of seaming which suggests a high degree of workmanship.
We felt that the filming was done in such a way as to obscure details
rather than highlight them and that many of the parts of the autopsy that
would have been difficult to fake, for example the folding back of the chest
flaps, were avoided, as was anything but the most cursory of limb
movement. We were also pretty unconvinced by the lone removal sequence.
In our opinion the insides of the creature did not bear much relation to the
exterior where muscle and bone shapes can be easily discerned. We all
agreed that the filming of the sequence would require either the use of two
separate bodies, one with chest open, one with chest closed, or significant
redressing of one mortal. Either way the processes involved are fairly
complicated and require a high level of specialized knowledge.
Another expert, Trey Stokes—a Hollywood special effects “motion

designer” whose film credits include The Abyss, The Blob, Robocop Two,
Batman Returns, Gremlins II, Tales from the Crypt, and many others—provided
an independent analysis at CSICOP’s request. Interestingly, Stokes’ critique
also indicated that the alien figure was a dummy cast in an upright position. He
further noted that it seemed lightweight and “rubbery,” that it therefore moved
unnaturally when handled, especially in one shot in which “the shoulder and
upper arm actually are floating rigidly above the table surface, rather than
sagging back against it” as would be expected. (Stokes, 1995)
CSICOP staffers (Executive Director Barry Karr, Skeptical Inquirer
Assistant Editor Tom Genoni, Jr., and the writer) monitored developments in
the case. Before the film aired, CSICOP issued a press release, briefly
summarizing the evidence against authenticity and quoting CSICOP Chairman
Paul Kurtz as stating: “The Roswell myth should be permitted to die a deserved
death. Whether or not we are alone in the universe will have to be decided on
the basis of better evidence than that provided by the latest bit of Roswell
fakery. Television executives have a responsibility not to confuse programs
designed for entertainment with news documentaries.”
—JOE NICKELL
References
“Alien or Fake?” Sheffield Star (August 18, 1995).
“American Journal” (September 6, 1995).
Berlitz, Charles, and Moore, William L. The Roswell Incident (Grosset and Dunlap, 1980; Berkley Books,
1988).
Chittenden, Maurice. “Film that ‘Proves’ Aliens Visited Earth Is a Hoax,” (London) Sunday Times (July
30, 1995).
Clark, Jerome. “UFO Hoaxes” in Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, Stein, Gordon, ed. (Gale Research, 1993).
Kent, Jeffrey. “Bulletin 2: The Purported 1947 Roswell Film,” Internet (May 26, 1995).
Kurtz, Paul. Quoted in CSICOP press release: “Alien Autopsy: Pact or Fiction? Film a Hoax Concludes
Scientific Organization” (April 25, 1995).
Nickell, Joe, and Fischer, John F. “The Crashed-Saucer Forgeries,” The International UFO Reporter
(March/April 1990).
Stokes, Trey. Personal communication, (August 29-31, 1995).
Stringfield, Leonard H. Situation Red: The UFO Siege (Doubleday, 1977).
Thomas, Dave. “The Roswell Incident and Project Mogul,” Skeptical Inquirer (July-August, 1995).
Uthman, Ed. “Fox’s ‘Alien Autopsy’: A Pathologist’s View,” Usenet, sci.med.pathology (September 15,
1995).
Wallace, Cliff. Letter to Union Pictures, (August 3, 1995), quoted in Wallace’s letter to Graham Birdsall,
UFO Magazine (August 16, 1995), quoted on Para-Net (August 22, 1995).
Wecht, Cyril. Quoted on “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?” Fox Network (August 28, and September 4,
1995).
alien gallery The illustrations that appear on the following four pages represent
classic examples of alien beings that have been reported from 1947 to the
present. I have researched each case in order to depict these beings as
accurately as possible.
The Humanoids (Charles Bowen, et al., 1969) was a useful reference for
some of the earlier cases. I have used artistic license only where insufficient
information was available to determine exactly what was seen.
Whenever possible in occupant cases it is important that the investigators
work with illustrators, or with the witnesses themselves, to produce drawings of
the alien beings as well as getting detailed verbal descriptions. Only the
combination of words and images can give a reasonably complete idea of the
physical appearance of the reported beings.
For all we know, subtle differences in the pattern of scales on a reptilian
being, or the shape of the eyes on a Gray being, may ultimately turn out to be
very important in solving the UFO mystery.
It is hoped that this pioneering effort to document reported alien features
will prove useful to serious researchers in the future.
—DAVID W. CHACE
References
Bowen, Charles, ed. The Humanoids (Henry Regnery, 1969).
Chace, David W. A Visual Guide to Alien Beings (Privately published, 1995, 1996, 1997).
alien iconography. The familiar image of the little, big-headed humanoid

with large, wraparound eyes is the result of an evolutionary process. Like
Jesus’s portrait in art (Nickell, 1998) or the typical likeness of Santa Claus
(Flynn, 1993), today’s ubiquitous alien is the product of a selection process
involving interaction between alleged encounterees and the popular media.
Putting aside science fiction examples, and beginning with the origin of the
modern UFO era in 1947, a great variety of aliens characterized the early
period (see for example Huyghe, 1996). There were the “little green men”
reported in 1947 (Cohen, 1982), the beautiful, humanlike beings who appeared
to “contactees” in the 1950s, the hairy dwarfs common in 1954, and many other
varieties of alleged extraterrestrials reported in close encounters to the present
(Story, 1980).
The accompanying “Alien Time Line” (Nickell, 1997) depicts a selection of
such alien beings. It has appeared in various magazines and on several
television programs, including ABC’s 20/20 in a documentary on the “Alien
Autopsy” hoax. There it was used to show that the extraterrestrials that were
supposedly retrieved from the 1947 “flying disk” crash near Roswell, New
Mexico, were of a type not popularly imagined until many years later.
This type—appearing with the first widely reported alien abduction, the Betty
and Barney Hill case of 1961—is now seen everywhere (in slight variations) on
T-shirts, caps, ties, and other clothing items; featured on posters, wall hangings,
book jackets, etc.; and fashioned into candles, toys, keychains, and countless
other items.
As part of an elaborate extraterrestrial mythology that has developed, the
implication seems to be that the aliens are “time travelers”—in effect us as it is
assumed we will be in our distant evolutionary future (Nickell, 1984). (This is
in contrast to another mythical entity, Bigfoot, who is seen as our beastly
relative from the remote past.) As futuristic beings, therefore, the aliens have
dwindling bodies (due to presumed physical inactivity) and large brains (the
imagined product of increased intelligence). Some critics, however, are
skeptical of all human/humanoid models. As one commentator states, “While it
seems incredible that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, it is equally
incredible that it should resemble man” (Palmer, 1951).
Nevertheless, although they are sometimes cute and sometimes sinister (no
doubt as expressions of our collective hopes and fears), they represent a
relatively standardized type that is a creation in mankind’s own image.
—JOE NICKELL
References
Cohen, D. The Encyclopedia of Monsters (Dorsett Press, 1982).
Flynn, T. The Trouble with Christmas. Buffalo (Prometheus Books, 1993).
Huyghe, P. The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (Avon Books, 1996). (I relied heavily on this source, and
Vallée 1969.)
Nickell, J. “The ‘Hangar 18’ tales: A folkloristic approach,” Common Ground (June, 1984).
________. “Extraterrestrial Iconography,” Skeptical Inquirer (September/October,1997).
Palmer, R. “New Report on the Flying Saucers. Fate (January, 1951).
Story, R. D. The Encyclopedia of UFOs. (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
ALIEN TIME LINE

POSTSCRIPT: Joe Nickell’s “Alien Time Line” and entry on “alien
iconography” could lead to misunderstandings for students of UFO culture
interested in the evolution of ideas about aliens. Nickell, by his account, relied
heavily on Patrick Huyghe’s Field Guide to Extraterrestrials for the creation of
the Time Line, but the book was not a comprehensive catalog of UFO entity
encounters. It was a sampler of cases intended only to demonstrate the diversity
of imagery. It includes only a small fraction of the total number of alien images
appearing in UFO culture. Within any given type of alien, the book tends to use
a representative example of the image with no preference given to it being either
the first of the type or its most popular or influential manifestation. This leads to
significant omissions if the interest is to display ordering in a chronology.
The most glaring omission has to be the absence of the face that appears on
the cover of Whitley Strieber’s bestselling book Communion. Since it is
blatantly the template of most images of the Grays since 1987—and easily the
most significant image in the history of alien images—this omission is
astonishing. The omission of representations of Grays from the works of Budd
Hopkins, the most visible of alien abduction authors, is also troubling if one
seeks to understand the present standardization of the form of the Grays.
The aliens rendered by Steven Kilburn in Missing Time (Hopkins, 1981) are,
for example, the first known examples of large-headed degenerate humanoids
to display completely black eyes. The thin arms, disproportionately short legs,
and slight paunch to the abdomen are distinctive and demonstrate an
unambiguous relationship to the main alien in Steven Spielberg’s 1977
blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Hopkins’ next book Intruders (1987) introduced the thin, high necks into
Gray iconography. This trait is clearly related to the Art Deco style of the main
alien in Spielberg’s film. Prior to that film none of the Grays drawn by alien
abductees had such necks. Reinforcing the assumption is the presence of all-
black eyes and a number of facial features in both the film alien and drawings
in the Intruders book.
Whether or not Hopkins recognized the similarities, he failed to understand
the influence of the film for a simple reason. He thought the aliens in the film
were designed to look like aliens that had already been reported in the UFO
literature. He knew that J. Allen Hynek served as a consultant, and he thought
that guaranteed a basis in prior cases. He stated this in a radio interview
published in the Spring 1988 Skeptical Inquirer: “Allen Hynek had many
drawings that he gave to Steven Spielberg for use when he made Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, which of course was one of the biggest box
office successes of all time. There was a serious attempt to follow the data that
Allen Hynek and other people had gathered. So I think you can say Steven
Spielberg popularized the essential physical type that the UFO reports had
engendered before that time.”
This misimpression is easy to understand since Newsweek (November 21,
1977) reported that the chief alien was “designed by Carlo Rimbaldi out of a
consensus of reports.” An essay by Hynek for the noveli-zation of the film also
creates such an impression with the line, “In particular, the appearance of the
‘extraterrestrials’ were based on the most frequently reported features of such
beings.”
Neither Newsweek nor Hynek offer direct quotes by the builders of the film
alien. A comprehensive article on the effects work for the film in a special
double issue of Cinefantastique in 1978 has the builders denying this. Carlo
Rimbaldi specifically states, “When we met, he told me he wanted something
about 4 feet tall with a very large head and a slender body, but he gave me no
actual designs.” Rimbaldi then goes on to explain his reasoning for why the
alien appears as it does:
I felt that, though humanoid in form, the extraterrestrials would be at

least ten to twenty thousand years more advanced than humans, so I
designed the head proportionately larger. But with their increased reliance
on pure intellect, they would have a decreased need for such senses as
hearing and smelling, and so the ears and nose and other facial features
would become less prominent. And because of their extreme technological
orientation, I felt they would no longer smile as broadly as we do on earth;
but since they would still retain certain emotions, I gave them a slight
smile. Also, as the brain expanded, other parts of the body would take an
opposite course. The need for muscular movements would diminish, and so
their limbs would become thinner and longer. (Shay, 1978)
This is recognizably the same argument that H.G. Wells introduced many
decades earlier about the future evolution of the human form. It was repeatedly
used in the early science fiction pulps and even found its way into science
journalism. Anyone who thinks Rimbaldi is just hyping himself in these quotes
should dig up the Cinefantastique article and observe the paper trail of
discarded concepts and drawings made by the alien builders in the course of
their work. Add to this the readily confirmed observation that none of the
drawings of Grays in the abduction accounts before that time had the combined
traits of all-black large eyes and thin, high necks, and the role of the film in
influencing subsequent UFO iconography is solidly established.
Nickell’s Time Line presents a grasshopper alien over the year 1973 and
labels it insectoid, implying either its origin or dominance at that time. Mike
Shea said nothing about it until 1988, and he is fuzzy about whether it was
1973 or 1974. Ted Owens claimed contact with a pair of grasshopper aliens
named Twitter and Tweeter as early as 1965 and was a bit more vocal about it
at the time. Insectoids do not present a major presence until the 1990s after the
introduction of ancient Lovecraftian god-like mantis beings by Whitley Strieber
and John Lear. (Kottmeyer, 1999)
The significance of the Owens case and the intersection of UFO culture with
Big Bug culture are discussed elsewhere. (Kottmeyer, 1996, 1997) The use of
the Shea case on the Time Line introduces a systemic problem of method.
Should the historian put a given drawing on the year a claimant alleges or
believes he made contact, or on the year we can document the image was first
presented?
If the interest is in the evolution of iconography, historians should favor the
latter. The backdating could be fictitious for various reasons and the image
subject to cultural influences between the claimed date of the experience and
the putting of pen to paper. Nickell places Betty Andreasson’s drawing in 1967,
but no drawing was made before 1977. This is important because in 1975 the
television movie The UFO Incident aired, presenting the true-life story of the
Hill abduction. The film followed the hypnotic regression narratives of Betty
and Barney Hill more faithfully than we normally expect Hollywood
productions to be, but the aliens are not exact replicas of what either of the
Hills described and drew.
Note the complaints by Betty Hill in a 1978 interview:
My only serious criticism concerns the movie’s depiction of the aliens’
physical appearance. They did not look like that. The real ones looked more
human than their humanoid counterparts. Also the movie shows them as being
very short, but they weren’t. I’d say the leader was my size and I’m 5 feet tall.
And they weren’t of such slender build.” (Clark, 1978)
Similarly a comparison of the TV movie’s depiction and the drawings by
David Baker (done in collaboration with Barney Hill and published in the April
1972 issue of NICAP’s UFO Investigator) uncovers a number of important
differences. There is a sharp angle to the inner corners of the eye sockets in the
telefilm where the original shows a rounded curve. The pupils of the eyes are
larger in the film. A crease above the eye is more pronounced in the film than in
the drawing. The film alien has a slit mouth and a line in the film says it has no
mouth at all. Baker is told a membrane hides the mouth. The eyes in the film
also display a probably unintended effect that makes one eye appear blank
when seen from a glancing camera angle.
Betty Andreasson proved Raymond Fowler’s statement that “her powers of
visual recall seemed unusually acute” by incorporating all the film’s
modifications into her drawings of Quazgaa and his companions. (Fowler,
1979.) The 1967 date claim makes no sense in the appearance of these details.
The drawing labeled “little green men” and set on 1947 was first published
in 1964 (by Johannis Luigi). By Johannis’s own account, the drawing probably
was not faithful to drawings allegedly made in 1947 and subsequently lost by
others. (Creighton, 1969) Of greater concern is the fact that the expression
“little green men” does not seem to have been used in flying saucer journalism
in 1947. (Bloecher, 1967) There is also no evidence it appeared in any
newspaper clippings from the 1952 saucer wave, or for that matter in any
saucer journalism between 1947 and August 1955. It seems to first appear in
conjunction with the Kelly-Hopkinsville shoot’em up (in August of 1955). The
press described the case as involving “an army of little green men” though in
fact the witnesses denied the presence of any green color.
A wire service story on August 25, 1955, by Air Force public relations man
Captain Robert White reacting to the story also gave wide distribution to the
phrase “little green men” and it appears in frequent use thereafter. There is no
evidence whatever that little green men were a common form of saucer pilot
and what little evidence we have suggests the phrase got transplanted from
science fiction pulps. Fredric Brown, for example, speaks of the expression as a
cliché in a September 1954 story Martians Go Home! (Kottmeyer, 1999)
The 1978 Zanfretta alien is labeled reptilian, but one should beware that it is
neither the first or significantly influential. Curiously, the Time Line’s drawing
lacks the third eye that appeared in the original drawing. This caused some
amusement among badfilm buffs for it made Zanfretta’s alien look rather like a
cross between the reptilian Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and the
three-eyed Mutant from The Day the World Ended (1956).
There is one Reptoid type being as early as 1967, but the more significant
omission here is any representation of the current version of reptoids seen in
places like the M.I.T. conference (Pritchard, 1994), Linda Howe’s volumes, or
Discover and Omni magazines around 1982, among other places. (Craft, 1996;
Lewels, 1997)
Lastly, we come to the issue of the use of the Time Line to demonstrate the
anachronistic character of the Alien Autopsy Gray. We are told the type of alien
described a “a little, big-headed humanoid with wraparound eyes” first
appeared in 1961 with the Hill abduction. The initial descriptions of the entities
in Betty Hill’s nightmares after the 1961 sighting are described as normal sized
men with dark hair. Barney’s descriptions initially suggest military pilots. The
wraparound eyes get added in 1964, and his version only turns fully humanoid
after hearing tapes of the hypnotic regressions. (Kottmeyer, 1994, 1998) By the
time of the Baker drawing, the hair and nose are gone. It is the 1975 telefilm
that makes them little. This is a complex situation and hard to represent on a
Time Line, one would have to agree. Yet it can’t be skirted given the
importance of the Hill case. It has to be added that the drawing offered on the
Time Line adds to the general confusion by making the shape of the head too
globular and adding a thin neck. Such a neck is thoroughly anachronistic for a
pre-Spielberg abductor Gray.
The more serious error is the implication that there were no little, big-headed
humanoids before the Hill case. As early as July 9, 1947, there appeared an
item in the Houston (Texas) Post of a seaman who encountered a two-foot tall
saucer pilot with a round head the size of a basketball. (Davis & Bloecher,
1978)
In 1950, the Wiebadener Tagblatt (Germany) published a photo of a short
alien with a large oval head and described as having large, glaring eyes. Berlitz
and Moore published it The Roswell Incident (1980) with a cagey caption
refusing to say “whether it may or may not pertain to certain significant aspects
of the Roswell Incident.” Klaus Webner subsequently researched it and proved
conclusively it was an April Fool’s joke perpetrated by reporter Wilhelm
Sprunkel. He had confessed it in print two days afterwards and with Webner
upon contact. (Webner, 1991)
Additionally there are cases involving humanoids with big heads and short
frames appearing during the 1954 French wave. These are contemporary
enough to the alleged autopsy film to rebut the charge of anachronism. Big-
headed men with degenerated bodies was a commonplace in the science fiction
pulps in the early part of the century and pretty surely trace their ancestry to
H.G. Wells’s writings about the future form of man. Wells himself never
intended this form of future-man to be taken seriously as a scientific
extrapolation. It started as a jest upon Herbert Spencer’s writings and the
doctrine of orthogenesis that had a degree of acceptance among paleontologists.
(Kottmeyer, 1998)
Where the alien autopsy truly runs into trouble is when it bumps into a more
compelling anachronism. During the film, the “doctor” removes a black
membrane from the eyes. As discussed above, all-black eyes are
unambiguously a post-Spielberg development without precedent among earlier
Grays in the UFO literature. The notion of aliens having a removable covering
membrane seems unknown prior to the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth
with David Bowie.
The David Bowie character inserts membranes over his eyes so he can walk
among humanity undetected as the alien that he is. In an interesting bit of
malpractice, doctors who later examine him manage to fuse the membrane onto
his eyes. I suppose one can consider it appropriate to have promoters of the
Roswell crash, intended or unintended, borrowing material from a film with
such a title.
My final advice is to erase the numbers and use Huyghe’s drawings to prove
what he intended to prove, namely, the diversity of the imagination in UFO
culture.
—MARTIN S. KOTTMEYER
References
Berlitz, Charles, and William Moore. The Roswell Incident (Grosset & Dunlap, 1980).
Bloecher, Ted. Report on the Wave of 1947 (privately published, 1967).
Clark, Jerry. “Betty Hill—The Closest Encounter,” Saga UFO Report (January 1978).
Craft, Michael. Alien Impact (St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Creighton, Gordon. “The Villa Santina Case” in The Humanoids edited by Charles Bowen (Henry
Regnery, 1969).
Fowler, Raymond. The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979).
Gross, Loren. UFOS: A History—1952 in 6 volumes (privately published, 1987-1999).
Howe, Linda. Glimpses of Other Realities: volume 1: Facts and Eyewitnesses (publisher? and date?).
Kottmeyer, Martin S. “The Eyes That Spoke,” REALL News (July 1994).
________. “Space Bug a Boo Boo,” Talking Pictures (Summer 1996).
________.“Bugs Baroque,” UFO Magazine (July/August 1997).
________. “Varicose Brains,” Magonia (February 1998); also on the Magonia Web site.
________. “Heading into the Future,” Magonia (September 1999).
________. “The Fool on the Hill Case,” Doubting Thomas (October-November 1998).
________. “Graying Mantis” REALL News (May 1999).
________. “Little Green Men” (unpublished manuscript).
Kroll, J. “The UFOs are Coming!” Newsweek (November 21, 1997).
Lewels, J. The God Hypothesis (Wild Flower Press, 1997).
Pritchard, Andrea, ed. Alien Discussions—Proceedings of the Abduction Study Conference (North
Cambridge Press, 1994).
Shay, Don “Close Encounter Extraterrestrials” Cinefantastique (1978).
Webner, Klaus. “The Strange Case of Mister X” The Probe Report (September 1981).
Alien Identities (Govardhan Hill, 1993). Richard Thompson relates how

ancient Vedic texts from India may not be folklore and myth, but could
accurately preserve accounts of human interaction with extraterrestrial visitors.
These stories portray the peoples of India from 3000 B.C. onward being in
contact with advanced beings from a host of other worlds who traveled here in
aerial vehicles that resemble modern accounts of UFO craft.
Alien Impact (St. Martin’s Press, 1996). To help himself understand his own
“strange, UFO-type encounters,” Michael Craft explores the role of
consciousness in the UFO experience. He concludes that UFO contactees,
shamans, channelers, and white and black magic practitioners may all be seeing
the same thing, a deliberately deceptive phenomena stage-managed by cosmic
tricksters who are conditioning our species to engage in new behaviors.
alien motives A fundamental question in the great UFO-ET debate is: “If
aliens are indeed visiting us, why are they here?
Carl Sagan once wondered disdainfully “Why would all the anthropologists
in the neighborhood suddenly come to Earth?” J. Allen Hynek once asked why
would aliens visit Earth to scare people by swooping near their cars? Clearly
these are inappropriate questions since there is no basis for suggesting a
significant number of visitors are anthropologists. Furthermore, people who
travel a great deal on Earth rarely bump into anthropologists. Because people in
autos may be frightened by close approaches of flying saucers certainly doesn’t
mean that the purpose of the flights are to frighten the people. Surely drivers of
the crude automobiles of a century ago weren’t driving for the purpose of
frightening horses, even though horses were sometimes frightened by the
vehicles.
Before considering a host of possible reasons for visiting Earth, it is useful
to examine travel by Earthlings. The reasons for travel and the locations to
which one travels depend on a number of factors such as how long will the trip
take? What will it cost and who will pay the bill? How much time and money
can be spent? How important is the trip?
Between 1890 and 1910 millions of poor immigrants came from Europe to
North America in steerage class in ships seeking an opportunity to improve
their lives and their families or to escape tyranny. Many had to save for years to
obtain money for their passage. Before WW II, sleek luxury liners carried many
people, most of them quite rich, between Europe and North America in great
comfort. During WW II the Queen Elizabeth served as a troop carrier hauling
15,000 soldiers per trip at government expense. Their objective was to fight in
a war against tyranny.
In May, 1927, Charles Lindberg received great acclaim for the first solo
flight across the Atlantic. Last year ten million people flew across the ocean
with very few of them being pilots. Some have gone to London or Paris or New
York on the Concorde at great expense to spend a weekend. Impossible with the
Queen Elizabeth. It is interesting that many military bombers depend entirely
on aerial refueling to reach distant targets. Commercial airliners land for
refueling.
Anybody who spends much time at airports knows that there are many
different reasons for flying. With regard to interstellar travel, one might expect
that the number of trips and travelers would be determined by the ease of the
trip and the importance of the trip to whoever pays the bill.
What assumptions can be made about alien motivation? It seems to me there
is really only one: namely that every civilization would be concerned about its
own survival and security. That certainly seems true on Earth. Compare the
annual U.S. budget for national security concerns (Roughly $300 billion) with
that for anthropology and astronomy: surely under $1 billion. Security concerns
would certainly require that an eye be kept on all primitives in the
neighborhood. Especially close scrutiny would be required for those
civilizations that will soon be able to take their brand of friendship, when it is
hostility as it is for Earthlings, out to bother nearby civilizations. It was
perfectly obvious by the end of WW II to any alien observer that in less than a
century (which is no time at all by cosmic standards) this primitive Earthling
society would be able to reach the stars. Reasons for concern might be the
simple fact that between 1939 and 1946, we Earthlings killed at least 50 million
of our own kind and destroyed 1700 cities. Signs indicating that interstellar
flight would soon be a reality were: (1) nuclear weapon explosions; (2) the
flights of V-2 rockets gradually improved upon for intercontinental ballistic
missiles; and (3) the use of powerful radar indicating mastery of a whole new
area of technology.
It should be no surprise at all that the only place in the world in July, 1947,
where visitors could study all three new, futuristic technologies was
Southeastern New Mexico. Trinity site on White Sands Missile Range was
where the first atomic bomb was exploded. WSMR was also where dozens of
captured German V-2 rockets were being tested (by their German builders, for
the U.S.) and where the best tracking radar was installed to follow the missiles
which often didn’t go where they were supposed to go. Roswell is not far away.
In short then, it may well be that aliens are primarily visiting to evaluate our
society, our technology and countermeasures for it, and to make sure that
Earthlings do not move out into space until we get our act together. One often
hears the ridiculous question “why don’t they land on the White House lawn,
and say “take me to your leader?” Does anybody believe that the President of
the United States speaks for six billion Earthlings?. The UN doesn’t allow
membership for individual cities. Why would we expect the Galactic
Federation to allow individual countries (as opposed to a planet or solar
system) to apply for membership?
Many astronauts have expressed surprise that so little progress has been
made in terms of manned space exploration since our first moon landing in
1969. Many had expected that by now there would be bases on the moon and
successful manned expeditions to Mars. Furthermore, it is not a trivial question
as to why we didn’t launch Apollo 18, and Apollo 19 to the moon. All the
hardware was built, the crews were selected and trained, so the excuse that it
would have cost too much money sounds very hollow indeed. Are we being
quarantined?
An important aspect of this line of reasoning is that it would seem , since it
takes so little time once one starts down the advanced technology road, (look
back just 100 years) that during any period of a few centuries there are very
few civilizations in the neighborhood going through the transition from being
stuck on one’s own planet to being able to bother the neighbors. Our neighbors
are either way behind us or way ahead. Hence, everybody in the neighborhood
would be concerned about the activities of a primitive society (Earth) whose
major activity is tribal warfare. Note that planetary military budgets total near
$1 trillion per year. Yet every single day more than 30,000 Earthling children
die needlessly of preventable disease and starvation. Quarantining us would
seem to be expected rather than surprising. Remember that a major motto here,
for dealing with strangers, is shoot first and ask questions later. If you were an
alien,, would you want Earthlings out there?
Obviously, if interstellar jaunts within our neighborhood are as routine for
our visitors as transatlantic flights are for us, we might expect an enormous
variety of motivations for traveling here. What follows is a relatively brief list:
1. Perhaps our visitors are broadcasters with a weekly show called “Idiocy in
the Boondocks.”
2. Visitors might be mining engineers. Earth is the densest planet in the solar
system which means more rare, expensive, dense metals than on any other
planet including Rhenium, Gold, Uranium, Platinum, Rhodium, Tungsten,
Osmium, etc. The California and Klondike gold rushes of the 19th century
stimulated a great deal of often difficult travel.
3. Visitors could be graduate students doing thesis work on the development of
a primitive society, on foreign languages, on modern warfare.
4. Earth could be the equivalent of a refueling station for Ocean going ships of
the last century.
5. Gas, food, lodging next exit.
6. Perhaps this is the center of a vacation industry. Hunting and fishing; no
license required.
7. Perhaps Earth is the Devil’s Island of the local neighborhood with bad boys
and girls having been dumped here. Might be why we are so nasty to each
other. Georgia and Australia were initially settled by convicts.
8. Perhaps visitors have come to observe a natural catastrophe they know will
happen soon.
9. Visitors might be collecting plant, animal, and human genetic material, of
which there is an enormous variety, for breeding projects. Older planets
might have much less variety available.
10. Earth could be the “neutral” site for ET chess matches à la Fisher and
Spassky on Iceland.
11. We may have a convenient location from which one set of marauders might
be attacking another as the U.S. and Japan fought terrible wars on native
islands in the Pacific.
12. Perhaps visitors are checking out a colony or colonies started here a long
time ago.
13. Some visitors may be completing cross-galaxy flying solos.
14. Visitors may be intelligence spies for a variety of other civilizations in the
neighborhood.
15. Perhaps some visitors are gathering specimens for alien zoos.
16. Buyers for ET curio and antique dealers may be collecting specimens.
17. Perhaps some visitors are being punished. Spend two weeks near Earth,
punishment to last a lifetime.
18. Perhaps they are ET repairmen seeking the cause of interference with long
existing communications, computing, or beacon services in the solar system
19. Some ETs might be time travelers coming back to change things
20. Some visitors might be ancestors from the distant past who have been
traveling at close to the speed of light, coming back home to their
descendants’ world. Like Methuselah living 900 years.
21. Are some ETs talent recruiters for an ET sports group looking for bigger,
faster, stronger recruits?
22. Some visitors might be advance men for space religious missionaries.
Earthling missionaries often go to the ends of the Earth.
23. Artists, musicians, sculptures may be here to record new scenery in new
ways.
24. Perhaps this is the only planet in the neighborhood that doesn’t have a
planetary government or where a host of languages are still in use despite
space shuttle trips around the world in 90 minutes.
25. Perhaps the rules of the local Galactic Federation require that a complete
inventory of the fauna, flora, structures and resources of our planet be done
every 2000 years.
26. Remembering there are many reports of huge “mother” ships, which
apparently carry much smaller Earth excursion modules, the situation could
be as complicated as an aircraft carrier serving as a base for several dozen
smaller aircraft. Such a traveling city has pilots, cooks, mechanics, analysts,
and many other specialized crew members.
As the reader has now seen, there is no problem coming up with possible
reasons for alien visitors; in fact, the possibilities are virtually endless.
—STANTON T. FRIEDMAN
alien roots For readers interested in CE-3 (close encounters of the third kind)
aliens, it is important to realize that once upon a time there was no such thing
as a “Gray.” Before the publication of The Andreasson Affair (Fowler, 1979),
Missing Time (Hopkins, 1981), Intruders (Hopkins, 1987), Communion
(Strieber, 1987), and other popular works by a then new breed of
proponent/investigators, abductees claimed to have observed a wider range of
alien creature types. Since then, however, abductees have described primarily
bug-eyed gray humanoids. Skeptics could point out that a change in witness
descriptions following the publication of a few books is decisive evidence that
abductions are fantasies and not physical events.
Abduction proponents of the 1980s may have become dissatisfied with
earlier CE-3 entity descriptions, because many aliens seemed to them to look
unlike any others. It was as if different alien races from all over the galaxy were
visiting the Earth simultaneously. Certainly the abductionists could see that the
situation undermined their favored view, the extraterrestrial hypothesis. They
did not accept the possibility that abductees’ accounts are fantasies, which are
as individual as nightmares: two dreamers’ descriptions of an exotic monster
are never exactly the same. There were many fetal humanoid reports in CE-3s,
however, so the proponents focused their research (and later books and articles
discussed at UFO gatherings) on an evolving humanoid Gray, consistently
ignoring other entity categories. Thus a mere handful of advocates changed the
direction of abduction studies.
Entity reports (formerly called occupant or landing cases) have been mired
in credulousness and confusion from the very earliest CE-3s. This was so in
part because most UFOlogists refused serious consideration of psychological
and other non-extraterrestrial explanations for such reports. For many years this
situation has obscured ties between CE-3 entities and earthly folklore,
mythology, and literary tradition.
Researchers have also ignored classifiable distinctions among CE-3 alien
descriptions. Prior to the 1980s CE-3 creature reports were distributed more
evenly into six categories: humans, humanoids, animals, robots, exotics
(mutants or combinations of two or more types), and apparitions (ghostly
creatures that can change shape or vanish). The six categories are based on
physical characteristics only, and were not imposed on the data. They emerged
from a study of scores of entity descriptions of CE-3s along with those of
creatures from traditional and anthropological sources. This is not an attempt to
construct an exo-biological tree of life for aliens. The subjects here are folklore
and fantasy—not science—and the entity classifications offer some clarity to a
mazelike segment of UFOlogy.
CE-3 narratives are often fragmentary and sketches of aliens are amateurish,
but most entity descriptions can readily be linked to one of the six categories.
Witnesses’ awareness is acute and though they cannot always identify the type,
they routinely capture key entity attributes, as these quotes show: “One looked
human, but the others were little guys with big black eyes.” “Its face and hands
—they were more like claws—were covered with thick hair or fur.” “It walked
stiffly, like a robot.” “It’s got long hair...no appendages at all...no ears, no nose,
and maybe one eye in the center.” “One floated upwards, then just disappeared,
like a ghost.”
PREVIOUS STUDIES OF
CE-3 ENTITIES
In-depth studies of UFO/CE-3 entities have been few. The Humanoids

(Bowen, 1969) was an early collection of mostly anecdotal case reviews:
Jacques Vallée summarized 200 1954 European landings, Coral Lorenzen
described 29 U.S. cases, and Gordon Creighton discussed 65 Latin American
occupant and landing reports. Also in 1969, in Passport to Magonia, Vallée
collected a century of worldwide landing reports (1868-1968)—923 brief
sketches of cases—many of which involved entity sightings. David Webb and
Ted Bloecher produced catalogues of sightings for various years of the 1970s
and maintained the Humanoid study Group, which had collected 1000 CE-3
reports. In these and other works, the writers made few attempts to classify the
“humanoids” (then a newly coined synonym for aliens), and so possible entity
distinctions are confused. Even so, the six entity types are evident in many of
their accounts. In Webb’s 1973 study, witness descriptions were classifiable
into six types, but the distribution is skewed (18 percent robots, 12 percent
animals), perhaps because of same-year bias.
Occasionally there are major studies such as Creighton’s piece on Brazilian
abductee Antonio Villas-Boas. In the absence of meaningful case investigations
of more than a handful of CE-3s, however, we plod through a mass of
intriguing claims without guidance, and we do not learn much about ETs.
The books, articles, and CE-3 narrative excerpts published by Ray Fowler,
Budd Hopkins, and David Jacobs have focused on the fetal humanoid (though
they don’t refer to its perinatal connections)—to the exclusion of the other five
entity types. Jacobs (following Hopkins) implies that real abductees see only
bug-eyed Grays, and the rest are mistakes. He dismisses the Imaginary
Abductee Study in part because our subjects described too many entity types.
T.E. Bullard’s lengthy study of about 300 abduction reports, UFO
Abductions: Measure of a Mystery (1987), is an ambitious effort that will
doubtless continue to be a resource for researchers. A problem is that the
database for these abductions is fragmented, as Bullard admits. He cites 270
cases, but includes in his references several newspaper accounts and similarly
questionable sources. He concedes that there are only fifty good cases (about
one out of five), and that even these are seriously flawed. Bullard
acknowledges that no unambiguous scientific conclusion can be made about
such fragmentary, minimal, and uncertain data.
Bullard mentions only three types of entities (human, humanoid, and
animal), and ignores or confuses evidence for the robot, exotic, and apparitional
classes that make CE-3 entities consistent with entity types in mythology and
folklore. Following earlier writers, he calls all entities “humanoid,” as if
unaware that the word can also refer to a specific type of alien. But there are
clear descriptions of robots in the Larson and Hickson cases, unmistakable
exotics in the Garden Grove and Kendall reports, and a marvelous apparitional
entity in a South African case. These CE-3 categories won’t go away, but his
study doesn’t acknowledge their significance for entity typology.
EXAMPLES OF SIX
CE-3 ENTITY TYPES
As the following examples show, most entity types in CE-3s and folk
traditions classify themselves. Human and humanoid entities are self-evident
and plentiful. Animal entities are rare in abduction lore but sometimes appear
as part-animal exotics. Most robots are easy to recognize, whereas exotics are
more complex. Consider two examples of exotic entities: the marvelously
weird human/insectoid monster from the 1987 film Predator, and the 9-foot-tall
floating biped with elephantine feet from the Garden Grove CE-3 hoax. These
two entities have wildly varying anatomical particulars, but they are exotics in
that each is a mutant or combines features of two or more other entity types.
Apparitional beings are recognizable by their supernatural powers even if they
are also shape-shifters, in which case their “home” shape determines their
apparitional identity.
Type #1. Human entities: Human-appearing UFO creatures have the physical
form of human beings and are identified as such by witnesses. Height: 5 to 7
feet. Facial features, skin color, and hair are recognizably human. Bodily
movement is normal, as are voice and manner, except for cases in which these
beings are telepathic. Both genders are reported. Some humans are described as
“Nordics”: tall, blond, of seeming Germanic or Scandinavian lineage. Clothing
is usually a one-piece jumpsuit, as in the MUFON idealization which follows (in
Figure 1).
Type #2. Humanoid entities: Humanoid (human-like) entities are the most
frequently reported type of CE-3 alien, and are the original Little Green (now
Gray) Men. (See Fig. 2.) Their appearance is almost always distinctly fetal or
even embryonic: a short, frail stature; a disproportionately large head; pallid skin
color; underdeveloped facial features; and a hairless body. The dominant feature
of the Gray is their enormous, usually unblinking black eyes. Their size and
distinctive slanted, almond shape has since become the standard. The pupils are
usually double-sized and dark, with little or no white; some are cat-like and
vertical.
Body movement is normal to stiff, with frequent reports of floating.
Telepathic communication with a witness is routine, though voice
communication is sometimes reported. Despite their small stature and feeble
physique, humanoids are reportedly very strong. They are usually clothed in a
silver or gray skin-tight jumpsuit, although a few have worn a bulky “space
suit” with an apparent breathing apparatus. Taller humanoids function as
leaders or interact with the abductee during an abduction.
Behavior ranges from impish teasing to brutal torment, but is usually
clinically objective. Gender is usually unspecified, and although male and
female humanoids are reported, when seen unclothed most humanoids show no
genitalia. But not all: Antonio Villas-Boas’ 1957 claim was only the first of
many alleged alien/human sexual encounters. This “sexy CE-3” trend
reappeared suddenly in the 1980s, especially in the works of Hopkins and
Jacobs, and quickly became (and has remained) the primary focus of many
abductees and investigators. The abductee may “bond” with one humanoid
abductor during the course of the examination or its aftermath. The bond may
or may not be sexual, though sexual involvement leading to pregnancy or
“genetic” activities between humanoids and abductees has allegedly occurred.
Type #3. Animal entitles: CE-3 animal entities, rare except in Latin
American reports, show distinctly mammalian, reptilian, or other animalistic
features. (See Fig. 3.) They exhibit fur, claws, a tail, scales or similar epidermal
texture, pointed ears, enlarged teeth, and non-human eyes with vertical pupils
(sometimes glowing). There are a few reports of insect-like creatures, with
exoskeletons and pincers. Height: 2 to 8 feet. Most animal entities assume an
erect stance, although some slouching, ape-like postures and body movements
are reported. Communication modes range from growls to telepathy. Gender is
undetermined and few clothed animals are described. Animal entities
sometimes carry an unpleasant odor.
Most alien animals appear in CE-3 reports in the form of exotic entities,
specifically as animal/human, animal/apparition, or other combinations. Few
reports tell of extended communication, close involvement, or bonding between
abductees and CE-3 animals; rather, encounters tend to be violent. Although
abductees elsewhere have not encountered many animal abductors, three
animal entities appear in the sixteen narratives of the 1977 Imaginary Abductee
Study.
Type #4. Robot entities: CE-3 robots (Fig. 4) seem to be made of metallic or
other non-organic materials, and they move at various speeds in a stiff or
otherwise unnatural manner. They sometimes float or fly. Some have glowing
eyes. Height: a startling range of 6 inches to 20 feet. Their shapes are mostly
bipedal, but huge building-like machines are reported. Communication: voice
and telepathy. Clothing includes “welder’s helmets,” padded space suits, and
bubble-dome headgear (for improbable air-breathing robots?). Witnesses may
have difficulty distinguishing robots from other creatures that would be
perceived to move clumsily in bulky suits.
Type #5. Exotic entities: Exotic entities (Fig. 5) are mutants or combinations of
two or more other entity types. They display extraordinary physical
characteristics and may be grotesque and/or repulsive (at least to earthlings). A
richly diverse category, exotics include the infamous Bug-Eyed Monsters of
science fiction, mythical beings such as the Minotaur (a man/bull), creatures
with anatomical deformities (e.g., Cyclops), assorted demons, and a group of
reportedly bizarre CE-3 entities.
One subset of exotic entities may relate to birth memories. It includes
tentacled placental/umbilical dragons of myth and legend, which are updated in
science-fiction and fantasy films as special-effects monsters dripping with birth
gore (e.g., in the Alien film series). Although tentacled aliens are common in
sci-fi magazine illustrations, they are paradoxically rare in CE-3 narratives.
Fig. 1. Human-type entities
A. MUFON idealization of a typical human entity. B. Australian case, 9/6/73. C.

Example of legendary “Man in Black,” a shadowy being of official or unearthly
origins notorious for alleged contacts with UFO witnesses after sightings. D.
Christ-like human in Winchester, England, 11/14/76. E. Vila Velha, Brazil,
2/3/73. Note puffy variation on usual jumpsuit. F. Early Contactee George
Adamski’s “Venusian” friend, allegedly met 11/20/52. Most Contactee entities
are human.
Fig. 2. Humanoid-type entities
A. MUFON idealization of a humanoid entity. B. Humanoid specter from the

peak time of a major UFO flap, Goffstown, New Hampshire, 11/2/73. C.
Policeman Herbert Schirmer’s humanoid, Ashland, Nebraska, 12/3/67. D.
Policeman Lonnie Zamora’s two humanoids near their egg-shaped craft,
Socorro, New Mexico, 4/24/64. E. Paulo Silvieira humanoid, Itaperuna, Brazil,
9/22/71. F. Travis Walton’s explicitly fetal humanoid, Heber, Arizona, 11/5/75,
reported about two weeks after the telecast of the Betty Hill abduction, The UFO
Incident (on NBC-TV).
Fig. 3. Animal CE-3 entities
A. MUFON idealization of a CE3 animal (based on a Brazilian case). B. Animal

reported during a major UFO flap, El Yunque Mt., Puerto Rico,10/20/73. C. A
driver glimpsed this animal near Frederick, Wisconsin, 12/2/74. D. A Bigfoot-
like entity, Beech Hills, Pennsylvania, 8/23/73. E. A froglike amphibian entity,
Carignan, France, 5/2/76. F. An ape-like entity reported during the 1973 flap,
Cincinnati, Ohio, 10/12/73.
Fig. 4. Robot CE-3 entities
A. A robot with a highlighted navel area, a pattern in other entity descriptions,

described during the 1973 flap, Draguinan, France, 10/19/73. B. A trio of robotic
entities in a spherical craft, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 8/28/63. C. Goodland,
Kansas, 6/20/76. D. Robot reported in Ashburn, Georgia, 10/19/73 on the same
date as the robot in France (A.). E. Three robot machines, one 20 feet tall,
Prospect, Kentucky, 1/27/77. F. A mummy-like robot in a much-publicized CE-
3, Pascagoula, Mississippi, 10/11/73.
Fig. 5. Exotic CE-3 entities
A. One of several exotic entities, Kelly-Hopkinsville, Kentucky, 10/21/55. No

UFO was reported. B. “Grasshopper-eyed” entity of the Judy Kendall CE-3,
Woodland, California, 11/25/71. C. Mysterious head-tubes on an exotic, Athens,
Georgia, 10/20/73. D. Weird exotic entity seen in Fargo, North Dakota, 8/26/75.
E. Bizarre malformed exotic, Branch Hill, Ohio, 5/25/55. F. Reptile-skinned
entity of the Garden Grove Case, reported in Apache Junction, Arizona, 3/14/71.
Fig. 6. Apparitionals
A. Apparitional humanoid emerged from a ball of light, Garden Grove,

California, 11/21/75. B. A grinning “electric” apparitional, Albany, Oh.,
10/16/73. C. A ghostly apparition, Riverside, California, 8/29/55. D. Little
Lever, England, 1964. E. Talavera la Real, Spain, 11/12/76. F. Salisbury,
Rhodesia, 5/31/74. The apparition in this case supposedly told the witnesses that
they would see the apparition as whatever they wished -- a duck, a monster,
whatever. The witnesses called this entity a “multi” -- aptly emphasizing its
capacity for multiple changes of form. An Imaginary Abductee described a
precisely similar multi event three years later.
Fig. 7. Children’s drawings of aliens
A. A female human UFOnaut, perhaps a self-portrait. B. Oddly, this humanoid

was one of very few of its type in 180 drawings. It has just three fingers. Most of
the sketches depicted exotics. C. This tentacled animal entity suggests that even
young children are exposed to expectations of tentacled aliens in UFOs.
D. A beeping robot with antennae and clumsy joints—along with an apparent
navel!
E. A very imaginative sketch of a one-eyed exotic with multiple arms—and a
tail!
F. This animated LSD pill testifies to young people’s acute awareness of the real
world about them. Is this drawing one youngster’s cynical assessment of CE-3
reports? Perhaps, but it also suggests the view that entity sightings are
apparitions, whether spontaneous or hallucinogenic.
Fig. 8. CE-3 traditional entity parallels
Fig. 9. CE-3 entities’ navel and umbilical symbolism

Fig. 10. Six creature types from world folklore
A. Giant B. Pooka C. Kelpie D. Stock E. Fachan F. Fairies
A. Folklore’s giants, despite their great size, are essentially human in physical
appearance. B. A pooka. Like elves, leprechauns, and brownies, pookas were
humanoid, but they also had apparitional powers. C. The pony-like kelpies from
Irish lore were mischievous clawed water-demons. D. A wooden image of a
baby called a “stock” or a “changeling” was supposedly vivified and left by
kidnapping fairies in place of a nursing infant or human baby, and for a time
passed for a real child before sickening and dying. E. One of the most bizarre
folk creatures was the Fachan of Irish belief, who reportedly had one eye, one
arm that emerged from its chest, one leg, and a nasty disposition. F. Fairies, like
demons and divinities, were “shape-shifters” or polymorphous.
Fig. 11. Six creature types from Alice’s Wonderland
A. The very human Alice can’t resist her curiosity about everything. B.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee are a special type of humanoid—mirror images of
each other known as enantiomorphs. C. The White Rabbit is personified, but is
an animal nevertheless. D. The Queen’s gardeners, like the rest of her court, are
playing cards brought to robotic life. E. The exotic Humpty Dumpty. F. The
Cheshire Cat’s apparition.
Fig. 12. Six creature types in Shakespeare
Though Shakespeare particularized his non-human creatures in wondrous

fashion, they were patterned after well-established models in folklore and
tradition. These examples are from two fantasies, Midsummer Night’s Dream and
The Tempest.
A. Theseus, the human Duke of Athens. B. Puck or Robin Goodfellow, a

typically mischievous hobgoblin, brownie, or pooka, also had the shape-shifting
powers of many other fairies. C. Bottom, after Puck changes him into an ass.
Technically an exotic, he is the closest thing to an animal character in
Shakespeare. D. Shakespeare’s only robot is shown in a 19th-century illustration
of Snout’s costume for the part of the Wall in the ludicrous playlet about
Pyramus and Thisbe. E. Caliban, the exotic monster of The Tempest, is the half
human, half demonic offspring of a sorceress and a demon. F. Ariel, an
apparitional fairy in The Tempest, spends much of his time on stage as an
invisible presence.
Fig. 13. Six creature types from The Wizard of Oz
A. The adventurously human child heroine, Dorothy. B. Munchkin-style

humanoids. C. The Cowardly Lion is a personified animal. D. The Tin
Woodsman may be the world’s most famous robot. E. The Hammerheads are
one of several exotics in Oz. F. The Wizard as an apparition: a scene he creates
with technology rather than magic.

Type #6. Apparitional entities: Apparitionals (Fig. 6) may float, change form,
materialize, or dematerialize. Akin to ghosts and fairyland creatures,
apparitionals possess a rich tradition in mythology and contemporary folklore:
angels, demons, trickster figures, and the “Beam me up, Scotty” telepor-tation
technology of TV’s Star Trek. Through shape-shifting, apparitionals can mimic a
human, animal, or any other creature or thing, thus temporarily masking their
true identity; yet they are distinctive enough to be easily classified.
Communication is verbal or telepathic but often is non-existent. Height: 2 to 10
feet.
Apparitional capabilities are shared by other entities. Some humanoids
become temporary apparitionals. They change shape unexpectedly, float, pass
through walls and windows unscathed, or disappear and reappear at will—and
then revert to being a humanoid. Similar abilities have been attributed at times
to every supposed alien type that abductees describe. The presence of these
powers—certainly among the most fantastic of reported entity faculties—
underscores abductions’ linkages with folklore and myth.
PERSPECTIVES ON
CE-3 ENTITIES
Origins of entity types: The origins of entity types are open to speculation.
Human entities could develop out of witnesses’ awareness of their own body.
Humanoids are largely fetal and probably have perinatal roots. Resemblances
among humanoids and brownies, imps, and hordes of other “little folk”
seemingly link them all with human birth events. Numerous animals and robots
in folklore, myth, and contemporary sources help explain them in CE-3 reports.
Exotics may be traced to mutant human or animal births. Apparitional entities’
powers of rapid transformation may have entered myth via ancient peoples’
responses to sudden changes in individual human development and attitudes, or
metamorphoses in the natural world.
The six entity types have appeared in countless contemporary formats—
comic books, science-fiction films, TV cartoons, advertisements, and other pop
culture—though never in a context with identifying categories that provide
perspective and awareness. Every schoolboy (and potential hypnotic subject)
knows about the entity classes on some level and can sprinkle his imagined
yarns with them, as our 1979 study of a group of adolescents in Orange County,
California demonstrated. About 180 mentally gifted children in grades 6, 7, and
8 were asked to draw their conception of a UFO occupant. Their responses
were readily classifiable and represented the complete range of six entity types:
Parallels in traditional and CE-3 entities: A well-established pattern in folklore

and traditional literature is entity clothing: typically a seamless, one-piece jump
suit or similar outfit that covers the body except for the head and the hands
(which may be gloved). Compare the “UFOnaut” in Fig. 8-A with Fig. 8-B, a
19th-century sketch of traditional brownies from folklore. Both creatures are
small in stature and have frail physiques. They wear similar one-piece, seamless,
skin-tight garments that we may interpret as skin, for it is often described as
slick and shiny like plastic, suggesting a newborn’s wet skin. Other birth
parallels include many reports of instrument-carrying UFO entities (Fig. 8-C)
and elves from folk tradition (Fig. 8-D). The tube-like instruments suggest
another perinatal reminder: the umbilical cord. With ultrasound viewers, fetuses
have often been observed grasping the umbilical, either in contentment or fright.
A curious aspect of witnesses’ entity sketches is that facial features and
extremities are sometimes missing, as in Figs. 8-E and 8-F. Inadequate drawing
or observational skills may be responsible, though some witnesses maintain that
certain entity features were not perceived. There are no analogs in traditional
sources for such anatomical omissions.
Navel and umbilical symbolism: CE-3 entities often wear a large buckle,
medallion, or similar device on their abdomen (as in Figs. 9-A through 9-C),
sometimes with a diagonal strap or “Sam Browne” belt across the chest (as in
Figs. 9-D through 9-F). Sometimes the buckle device glows brightly (Fig. 9-B).
The emphasis on the navel area and the umbilical strap are distinctly perinatal,
suggesting that memories of birth events have a significant role in CE-3 fantasies
about entities other than the fetal humanoid. Researchers do not offer persuasive
alternate interpretations of such details.
Entity types from various sources: I have compiled illustrated sets of creature
types from folklore and literary traditions in support of the validity of the six-
category CE-3 entity classification system. The six creature types thrive in
diverse cultures worldwide. There are always human entities and diminutive
fetal beings that resemble but are distinct from adult humans, as with the rest of
the entity types. The patterns in CE-3 witnesses’ alien fantasies are operative in
wide-ranging sources, including: Greek fables and mythology, Christian belief,
de monology, science fiction, comic books, breakfast cereal-box heroes, and the
Imaginary Abductee narratives. The following four examples are representative.
Frequencies of CE-3s and UFOs: Nobody knows how many abductions or

other CE-3s there have been worldwide since 1947. The Bullard study of about
300 cases used data up to the early 1980s. Abduction proponents claim to have
discovered thousands of unknown CE-3s in the 1980s and 1990s. If CE-3s now
number 5000, as suggested by the very dubious Roper survey, they are still
dwarfed by the guestimated three million or so raw UFO sightings worldwide
over the past half-century (about 150+ daily).
Whether or not we conservatively dump 90 percent of UFO sightings as
IFOs and 90 percent of CE-3s as hoaxes and mistakes, abductions total only
about 0.167 percent of UFO sightings (5000÷3,000,000=00167). That means
less than two of every thousand UFOs abduct someone. Although abductions
are supposedly what UFOs do, these representative statistics argue otherwise.
Why the discrepancy?
Proponents have traditionally explained the disproportion in three ways: 1)
we encounter aliens only when they want us to; and 2) most abductees forget
their CE-3, in strict obedience to their captors’ orders. A third explanation,
witness reticence, at first glance seems better—who wants to admit being
abducted by weirdoes from outer space? Proponent-investigators tell of scores
of abductees in professional or otherwise sensitive positions (doctors, lawyers,
politicians, etc.), who shun all publicity. Yet the public spotlight, such as that
offered by Hopkins and others in the past twenty years or so, has obviously
proved irresistible to many wannabe famous abductees. The numbers of alleged
abductions and books about them since about 1980 has multiplied, while
UFO/IFO sightings, corrected for population growth, are about the same. Even
so, the ratio of CE-3s to sightings remains minuscule.
The most likely reason for the frequency imbalance between UFO sightings
and CE-3s is that the two are separate and distinct experiences, and have
nothing to do with one another—aside from the idea of ET visitors. There has
never been an authenticated CE-3 in which two or more persons watch while a
UFO lands, occupants get out and abduct someone, then the UFO takes off.
This primal CE-3 scene, supposedly the initiating and definitive event of
unknown numbers of typical abductions, has never been authentically
witnessed. There is no unambiguous evidence that it—or anything similar to it
—has ever occurred.
Abductions are most likely fantasy/hallucinations and are subjective
experiences that probably date from the first shaman’s “vision quest” early in
human prehistory. UFO sightings at best are objective physical events—
whatever the UFO actually is. The lack of connections between these events
helps account for the contrasting numbers.
Of course, many “experiencers” (now the preferred term for abductees)
surely mistake their dreams or nightmares for CE-3 fantasies, or they really do
forget them. Others may undergo their CE-3s as NDEs, OBEs, Marian
visitations, or a dozen other abduction analogs. Also, it has been established
that the CE3-like hallucinations of sick and elderly people are routinely ignored
by clinical and institutional personnel, and thus are not counted.
Psychologists and other social workers—within and outside of UFOlogy—
until recently have not provided a convenient, scientifically respectable, and
supportive way for percipients to report, communicate about, and deal with
supposed alien abduction events. Indeed, psychologists had not even
acknowledged the CE-3 syndrome until a few national support groups for
reported CE-3 witnesses, such as P.E.E.R. and T.R.E.A.T., were formed.
Psychiatrist John Mack and hypnotherapist Edith Fiore are two of an increasing
number of professionals (never mind that most are true believers) who have
created CE-3 support groups as a regular part of their practice.
Low numbers of abduction reports could also reflect the fact that researchers
have not embraced credible non-ETH theories to account for such experiences.
More “hidden” abductees/experiencers might come forth if there were a viable
alternative interpretation to being snatched by planet-hopping aliens. Compared
to the ETH, the Birth Memories Hypothesis does not seem far-out at all.
Why only six types of CE-3 entities? If CE-3s are not real and witnesses are
fantasizing wildly, why do they repeatedly describe the same few types of
creatures-—rather than Grays or a sequence of uniquely different entity forms?
And why are there only six categories?
To repeat, witnesses describe the same six classes of aliens because
abductions are fantasies based on the only models they have: earthly folklore
and tradition. As to the six types, it can be shown that they do not exhaust the
range of creature types, even within traditional Earth lore. Ancient Middle
Eastern cylinder seals (ca. 1000 B.C.) depict what were called “elementals,” a
variety of creatures that would be unclassifiable under the six-part system.
These archaic engraved figures are “heroes and deities” created out of
elemental processes (fire, air, water, and earth). They have human or animal
bodies, but are shown with water, flames, or light streaming out of their
anatomy.
Although the flowing water and other substances may have
placental/umbilical relevance, these creatures’ anatomy and connections with
elemental forces make them qualitatively distinct from the other six types. They
can properly be placed in a seventh entity category.
There are a few elemental creatures in TV cartoons, comics, and folklore,
but as far as I know they are not described in CE-3s. Perhaps there are too few
elementals in contemporary sources, or their differences from other entity types
are too subtle, to serve as models.
Other entity types: Although this seventh entity type can be considered the
exception that proves the CE-3 six-category rule, additional kinds of entities are
certainly conceivable. From time to time imaginative authors have proposed
unusual creatures that would not be classifiable under the six CE-3 categories.
In astronomer Fred Hoyle’s novel, The Black Cloud, a vast intelligent cloud
“lives” in interstellar space, with a molecular heart, a brain, and other necessary
organs. It feeds on stellar energy and its central nervous system functions via
radio waves.
Astrophysicist Ronald Bracewell has imagined “intelligent scum,” an
enormous collective cellular civilization that thinks and acts as a single entity
and controls its environment through a kind of evolutionary specialization.
Equally bizarre is astronomer Frank Drake’s fictionalized neutron-star life
form: microscopic, macronucleic creatures weighing tons each and living out
their accelerated lives on a 100-million-degree world in fractions of a second.
Philosopher Wilfred Desan describes a creature extended indefinitely in both
space and time, making it quasi-infinite and immortal, and since there would be
no other of its kind it would be a biological singularity.
These examples are fanciful, but one can infer that the infinitely resourceful
universe could produce a greatly more varied range of alien entity types than
scientists, writers, and CE-3 witnesses have conjectured.
Must ETs look like us? Considered opinion is divided on whether or not aliens
would resemble Earthly life forms. Some exobiologists and SF writers believe
that ETs would share many qualities with us. They point out that eons of
evolutionary survival have shaped human anatomical and physiological makeup,
and many characteristics seem too useful and widespread among other living
creatures not to be essential. They conclude that aliens might not look much
different from the rest of Earth life.
Let us speculate that alien life-forms would be more efficient if they were
not in a collective, but physically independent from others of their kind—
though they could be linked mentally. If made of living tissue they would have
to eat, they could get sick, be injured, or die. It is difficult to imagine a hitech
space-traveler without something like a sizeable brain, several senses, and
mobility. The brain needs protection, and the major sense organs should have
short nerve pathways for efficiency; so something like eyes, ears, nose, and a
mouth should be in that something like a skull covering the alien’s brain.
Bilateral symmetry gives human beings survival-oriented 3-D vision and
stereophonic hearing, though maybe those are not essential. But an upright
stance could place an alien’s limb—with something like hands bearing
something like fingers—within convenient distance of its eyes for manipulating
food, weapons, and tools. The being would be neither a giant (too ponderous)
nor microbe-sized (too few brain cells). It would have to be able to
communicate. Telepathy would be the best mode, but speech is efficient too.
And aliens almost certainly would be sexual creatures.
An ET space traveler could use traits such as curiosity, intellection, high
skills, flexibility, imagination, and a value system with enough altruism to
delay tangible rewards; and maybe an emotional nature that helps make
existence fun or otherwise worthwhile. If their purpose is to observe Earthlings
longitudinally, they need the capacity to feel joy and/or despair.
But other writers have warned against Earth chauvinism, the assumption that
conditions for life elsewhere must be generally Earthlike: carbon-based, of
moderate temperature, with available water, oxygen, and so on. They reason
that different geophysical conditions could create living forms far different
from any that have ever existed on Earth. A truly alien being might be
something we cannot yet easily imagine, the likeness of which is not in our
folklore or systems of traditional belief.
Again, consider the long-term effects of technology. If the dinosaurs had
evolved into a smart reptile, it might have been an upright biped, verbal, sexy,
and with tool-making hands—more than a little like us. But what would the
surviving dinosaurs look like today, after a hundred million years of evolution
and hi-tech genetic innovations? We are on the verge of modifying our human
genome by seeking super babies with higher IQs, more attractive physiques,
and better health. Even if an alien race started out as human-like, after a few
hundred millennia of super technology a species could evolve itself into
unimaginable modes that CE-3 witnesses might perceive, but which would be
unclassifiable within traditional Earthly life forms.
If aliens ever really come here and are like Travis Walton’s fetal humanoids
or the Garden Grove exotics, they will leave physical traces and their presence
will be provable. In the absence of physical evidence, CE-3s would gain more
credibility if even a few abductees told us of a new category of entities, things
without the familiar connections to folklore, myth, and tradition; things
believable yet strictly alien to Earthly experience. Regrettably for true
believers, no such CE-3 aliens have yet been described.
—ALVIN H. LAWSON
References
Bowen, Charles, ed. The Humanoids (Henry Regnery, 1969).
Bullard, T.E. UFO Abductions: Measure of a Mystery (Fund for UFO Research, 1987).
Fowler, Raymond E. The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979; Bantam Books, 1980; Wild Flower
Press, 1994).
________. Intruders (Random House, 1987; Ballantine, 1988). Jacobs, David M. Secret Life (Simon &
Schuster, 1992).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia (Henry Regnery, 1969; Neville Spearman, 1970).
alien types Since the late 1960s, a few UFO researchers have tried valiantly to
establish a typology of creatures said to be of an extraterrestrial nature. But so
great is the variety of alien life-forms reported in UFO incidents (critics like to
point out that there are as many types of aliens as there are people who report
them) that classification systems have generally failed to cover the entire range
of alien types, or take into account the dozens of small differences among the
reported entities.
To address this problem, and to counter the notion popularized by the media
that the “Grays” are the only “real” aliens, this writer developed an alien
classification system based strictly on phenotype (or the observable physical
characteristics) of the aliens reported in UFO incidents. This classification
system has been detailed (with some 50 sample cases, which are fully
illustrated) in my book: The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials (Avon, 1996).
I found that just about all the “aliens” seen during the past century could be
categorized as belonging to one of four broad classes.
The first class, the Humanoid, describes beings with an essentially human
shape: a head, torso, two arms, and two legs. The second class, the Animalian,
refers to entities that are far more animal in appearance than human. The third
class, Robotic, describes those that look distinctly mechanical. About 95
percent of alien reports fall into these three classes. The other 5 percent can be
lumped together into a catch-all category that, for want of a better term, I call
Exotic.
I then divided each of these four classes of aliens into a variety of distinct
types. Among the Humanoid, the first and the most recognizable are what I call
Human simply because they look so much like us that it would be impossible to
tell “them” from “us” on any busy metropolitan street corner.
The second type are the Short Grays, which thanks to Hollywood, if not the
aliens themselves, are the pre-eminent alien type reported today. But since
many short humanoid aliens do not in any way resemble Grays, either because
of their extreme hairiness, green skin tone, or bulky spacesuit, I created a
separate type called Short Non-Grays.
Rounding out the Humanoid class are two other types, the Giants, for those
entities that stand 8- to 15- feet tall, and the Non-Classic, for those that do not
fit into any other humanoid type—like the odd being with pointed ears and
mummy-like skin seen in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1973.
The second major class of beings, the Animalian, consist of entities as
different as Bigfoot, swamp creatures, goblins, and fairy-like aliens. For the
names of the five Animalian alien types—Mammalian, Reptilian, Amphibian,
Insectoid, and Avian—I simply drew upon their resemblance to either hairy
mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, or birds.
I found that all Robotic aliens could fit comfortably into one of two types.
Either the robots appear to be entirely “Metallic,” and are so named, or a part of
them, like their appendages, resemble flesh and are therefore called “Fleshy”
Robots. Likewise, I divided the Exotic class of aliens into two types: the
“Physical” Exotics, which resemble the classic blobs of science fiction, and the
“Apparitional” Exotics, which are at least partially transparent or ghost-like in
nature.
The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials was generally well received and is
widely regarded as the standard reference on alien types.
—PATRICK HUYGHE
Allagash abductions This was a multiple-witness abduction that involved

four art students, whose encounter occurred while on a camping trip in the state
of Maine. The case involved identical twins, Jim and Jack Weiner, and their
companions, Charlie Foltz and Chuck Rak, who were abducted from a canoe on
the Allagash Waterway on August 26, 1976.
The investigation took place between January 1988 and mid-1993. It
resulted in a 702-page (10-volume) report and a book entitled The Allagash
Abductions written by Raymond E. Fowler and published by Wild Flower Press
in 1993. The investigators of the case included: MUFON Director of
Investigations, Ray Fowler; a physicist who specialized in UFO entity cases; a
MUFON consultant in hypnosis; and consultants in the areas of polygraph and
psychiatric testing.
The UFO encounter was initially reported to Ray Fowler by one of the
percipients (Jim Weiner) during a UFO symposium at Waltham, Massachusetts,
in May of 1988. Jim told Ray that he, his twin brother Jack, and two friends
had a close encounter with a UFO while camping on the Allagash Waterway in
a wilderness area of northern Maine. Concurrent with the encounter they had
experienced a period of “missing time,” which had bothered them for years.
Years later, Jim was referred to Ray Fowler by his personal physician during
treatment at Both Israel Hospital in Boston. What follows is a synopsis of the
abduction accounts and the subsequent investigation.
On Friday night, August 20, 1976, the four young art students (all in their
twenties) left Boston, Massachusetts for a canoe and camping trip on the
Allagash Waterway. Upon arrival at a staging area, they hired a pontoon
airplane, which flew them and their canoes to Telos Lake on the Allagash
River. During the next several days they canoed and camped along the
waterway.
On the evening of Thursday, August 26th, they reached Eagle Lake, where
they set up camp and later decided to go night fishing for trout in a canoe. The
pitch darkness of the area necessitated the building of a huge bonfire to mark
their campsite, so that they could find their way back. Shortly after beginning
to fish, Chuck Rak became aware of a feeling that he was being “watched.” He
said: “I turned toward the direction from where I felt this and saw a large bright
sphere of colored light hovering motionless and soundless about 200-300 feet
above the southeastern rim of the cove.”
Chuck yelled for the others to look behind them. There, rising above the
trees was a huge oval glowing object. As their eyes became adapted to its
intense brightness, a gyroscopic motion was noted as if there were pathways of
energy flowing equatorially and longitudinally from pole to pole. This divided
the sphere into four oscillating quadrants of bright colored light. The color
changes were very liquid and enveloping, as if the entire object had a plasmatic
motion to it, like a thick sauce does as it starts a rolling boil.
Charlie Folz grabbed a flashlight and blinked it on-and-off toward the
object. Simultaneously, a tube-shaped beam of light erupted from the object and
hit the water. A glowing ring with a dark center reflected on the water’s surface,
indicating that the beam was low. The object and its extruding beam of light
began moving toward the canoe. Terrified, the campers began paddling
frantically toward their glowing bonfire and camp, as the beam swept across
the water and engulfed them.
It was from this point on that the conscious memories of the four differed
according to each of their vantage points.
The next thing Charlie remembered was paddling for shore and then
standing at the campsite with the others, watching the object move away.
Chuck Rak remembers staying in the canoe after the others had piled out in
panic onto the shore. Transfixed, still holding his idle paddle, he could not take
his eyes off the object.
Jack and Jim were able to consciously remember a bit more about the tail
end of the chase. Jack explained that “it was just behind us, and I could see that
we were never going to outrun the beam. It was advancing too fast and I
remember thinking ‘Holy Shit’! This is it! We’ll never get away.” The next
thing I knew, we were on the shore getting out of the canoe looking directly at
the object which was now about 20 or 30 feet above the water. The beam was
still coming out of the bottom of it like the object was sitting on the beam. It
hovered there, right in front of us, completely silent for what seemed like four
or five minutes.
“Suddenly the beam was pointing up towards the sky. The object began to
move up and away from us towards the southwestern sky and then shot into the
stars and was gone in just a second.”
Jim Weiner added: “There was no mistake that the beam was coming
directly to us. Then I remember standing on the lake-shore watching the object
hovering above the lake 50 to 75 yards in front of us.... Then the search beam
went upward into the sky and we saw it moving away at a tremendous speed.
We all seemed to be in a state of shock.... We just stood there unable to move or
talk.”
The object left with a step-like motion. It would suddenly implode into
nothing and than appear further in the sky and then repeat this strange flight
path before streaking out of sight.
When the strange anesthetizing effect wore off, Chuck got out of the canoe
and joined the others as they trudged dreamily up the beach to their camp. Even
in this state, they were dumbfounded when they realized what had happened to
the huge bonfire that had just been blazing a seeming several minutes ago.
“‘When we left to go fishing,” said Jim, “we set very large logs on the fire to
burn for a good 2 to 3 hours. The entire experience seemed to last, at the most,
15 or 20 minutes. Yet the fire was completely burned down to red coals.”
At that time, they had no memory of what happened during the time it took
for their huge bon fire to burn down. This remained a puzzle to them for years.
Several years after the Allagash incident, Jim suffered a head injury, which
caused tempero-limbic epilepsy. During treatment, Jim began to have
nightmares about he and his camping companions being nude and in a strange
place with bug-eyed humanoids around him. He also awoke at night to see
strange creatures around his bed. Sometimes he felt as he were being levitated
from bed; and other times after being overcome with paralysis, he felt
something was being done to his genitals. Jim’s doctor noticed that he was
overtired and asked him what was the matter. Jim refused to tell him at first but
when the doctor told him that it was affecting his medical treatment, Jim
confessed to what was happening to him. He also told the Doctor about his
prior “missing time” experience on the Allagash waterway. Jim’s physician was
familiar with the abduction phenomenon and advised him to contact a UFO
researcher. At that time Jim was reluctant to do so. However, later the doctor
saw a newspaper story about Ray Fowler lecturing at a symposium in the area
in May of 1988. He phoned Jim and convinced him to attend the lecture and
talk to Ray about the UFO experience.
In January of 1989, Ray Fowler initiated a formal investigation with
MUFON UFO entity specialist and physicist David Webb and MUFON
hypnosis consultant Anthony (Tony) Constantino. The investigation was
conducted in a careful and meticulous manner over a period exceeding two
years. After the four witnesses completed and signed MUFON UFO-sighting
forms, they were interrogated. Their stories were cross-checked for consistency
and a character check was performed to check their credibility.
It was obvious that the period of missing time had to be sandwiched between
sighting the object and reaching shore. The beam of light engulfing the canoe
seemed to be the dividing point between memory and amnesia. During the first
of a long series of hypnosis sessions, it was decided to concentrate on this
segment of the terrifying encounter.
Under hypnosis, all four witnesses relived detailed and traumatic UFO
abduction experiences during the period of missing time. All were transferred
from their canoe into the UFO by the hollow tube-like beam of light. On board,
they encountered strange humanoid creatures that exerted some kind of mind
control over them, so they could not resist their demands.
All four were made to take their clothes off and sit on a plastic-like bench in
a misty area illuminated by diffuse white light. After looking at their eyes and
in their mouths with a pencil-sized rod with a light on its tip, the entities placed
them in a harness and flexed their arms and legs. Then, one by one they were
made to lie on a table where each was examined by a number of strange
handheld and larger machine-like instruments that were lowered over their
bodies. During this segment of the examinations, the entities removed samples
of saliva, skin scrapings, blood, feces, urine, and sperm from each of the
abductees.
After the physical examinations, the abductees were made to dress and enter
another room, which had a round portal in one of its walls. They were lined up
and made to walk into the portal. Strange sensations surged through their
bodies as they found themselves floating down the hollow beam of light into
their canoe, which was now floating in shallow water at their campsite. The
tube-like beam of light seemed to hold the canoe steady as each person was
placed in it, in the same seating position that they were in prior to their
abduction.
Artist’s impression of Jim and Jack Weiner on a bench, in the UFO, with one of the aliens
As the hypnosis sessions continued, much detail was recovered about their
onboard experience. Also, it was discovered that the twins had undergone
bedtime visitations by alien creatures and had abduction experiences since early
childhood—in addition to being abducted a number of times during their adult
life. These experiences were relived in vivid detail while under hypnosis.
Their UFO experiences left physical evidence behind in the form of burns
on the bottom Jack’s feet. Jack also received a biopsy-like scoop mark above
his ankle during one of his adult abductions. The scoop mark was located just
above a scar left behind during an operation for an anomalous lump that had
appeared overnight on Jack’s leg. Jack’s local doctor thought it was a cyst, but
was unable to drain it, so referred Jack to a surgeon who removed it.
Jack was told that local pathologists did not know what it was and that it had
been sent to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, for further
analysis. However, when Jack’s medical records were checked, it was
discovered that the removed object was sent to military pathologists in
Washington, D.C., where it was analyzed by a United States Air Force Colonel.
Attempts for further information about the anomalous lump were thwarted, as
the surgeon would not cooperate with the inquiry.
In addition to character checks of the four abductees, a number of other
checks were made to ascertain witness credibility. Medical records, camping
diaries and photographs were examined. Friends and relatives that first heard
about the experience were interviewed. The head forest ranger who supervised
matters on the Allagash Waterway was located. He remembered the incident
and had reported it to the then active Dow Air Force Base located in Bangor,
Maine.
Psychological profile tests were administered to each abductee. Each was
also subjected to polygraph tests. All of these checks indicated that the four
percipients were honest and telling the truth about their experience.
The many-faceted and intriguing elements of the Allagash abductions also
provided a catalyst for a detailed correlation of the witnesses’ experiences with
benchmarks exhibited in other abduction reports being investigated and studied.
Such reports were derived from an exhaustive survey of 270 reported UFO
abductions in the United States and abroad by Dr. Thomas E. Bullard of the
University of Indiana. It was found that the four abducteas had experienced
many of the typical benchmarks of the UFO abduction phenomenon.
A number of alternate theories for the abduction phenomenon were also
examined in light of the Allagash abductions. These included hoaxes, fantasy-
prone personalities, psychoses, birth-trauma memories and archetypical images
form the so-called “collective unconscious.” Each of these was critiqued and
eliminated in the light of the evidence collected dueing the investigation.
The final 10-volume investigative report was made available to other
researchers for peer review. Public information about the case was
accomplished through Ray Fowler’s 1993 book, The Allagash Abductions, a
Time-Life book on the UFO-abduction phenomenon, and several TV
documentaries.
Charlie Foltz lying on the examination table; Jim and Jack sitting on a bench
Fowler’s report concluded that the moral character of the witnesses, the
graphic reliving of their experiences under hypnosis, and the extraordinary
correlations between their experiences and those of others provided
overwhelming evidence that their experiences were objective in nature. Such
evidence combined with the positive results of polygraph and psychological
tests, together with the typical physical effects found on the witness’s bodies,
prompted Ray Fowler to place the Allagash abductions in MUFON’s great
significance category.
—RAYMONDE. FOWLER
Allende letters The mystery of the so-called “Allende letters” arose in 1956,
when an annotated copy of Morris K. Jessup’s book, The Case for the UFO
(1955), arrived at the Office of Naval Research (ONR). It looked as if three
men (named “Mr. A.,” “Mr. B.,” and “Jemi”) had passed the book among
themselves, adding handwritten notes to Jessup’s text. Jessup also reported that
he had received a series of letters from Carlos Allende (a.k.a. Carl M. Allen).
The letters and annotations seemed to indicate that the writers had some special
knowledge of UFOs and alien cultures beyond that of any government on
Earth.
The story, as it is usually told, begins when the book arrives at the ONR.
Some researchers have claimed that Navy officers, after carefully studying the
text, became extremely interested and contacted Jessup. By that time, Jessup
had already received the letters.
The Navy, according to the story, requested and received permission to
reproduce the book in a limited edition. The original text was printed in black
and the notations in red. All the letters sent by Allende were included as an
appendix.
During the next several years the Navy allegedly spent taxpayer money,
time, and a great deal of effort researching the incident. Navy investigators
reportedly looked for Allende but failed to find him. Post marks suggested
Seminole, Texas, Gainesville, Texas, and DuBois, Pennsylvania, as locations
for Allende.
The letters concerned the alleged teleportation of a Navy ship from its dock
in Philadelphia to the a dock in Virginia and back again during the Second
World War. The experiment, allegedly witnessed by Allende, who claimed to be
a member of the crew, was mentioned only in a single brief article that
appeared in a single Philadelphia newspaper. Allende supplied neither the date
nor the name of the newspaper so that this aspect could not be corroborated.
Allende claimed that the experiment was a success but the people were
failures. Over half the crew was lost during the experiment, and the rest
suffered from a variety of strange side effects. Some, according to Allende,
were “mad as hatters,” while others would “go blank,” or “get stuck.” Allende
said they would seem to disappear or “freeze” on the spot.
The notes added to Jessup’s book were no less confusing. Terms like
“mother ship,” “great war,” “force cutters,” “magnetic and gravity fields,” and
“sheets of diamonds” were used. The notations explained what happened to the
men, women, ships, and planes that have disappeared in various locations
around the world. Allende and his friends seemed to explain many things that
no one else had been able to solve.
Sidney Sherby, an officer at ONR in 1956, told researchers in the 1970s that
the reprinted annotated book was not part of a Navy project as tradition
demanded, but a private investigation by men who happened to be in the Navy.
No one officially at ONR thought much about the case. They were not going to
waste time on an obvious hoax. It meant that members of the Navy, acting on
their own as private citizens, had been interested. The Navy had no objection
with the reproduction as long as it involved no Navy personnel, time, or
finances. The fact that they were employed by the Navy shadowed them, giving
rise to the rumor of official Naval interest.
Jessup, who had a financial stake in the Allende Letters, and who saw them
as a way of revitalizing his sagging career, never learned the truth. His search
came to an end on April 29, 1959, when he was found dead in a Dade County,
Florida, park. His death was ruled a suicide.
The whole story should have ended in the 1970s when Jim Lorenzen
announced that the whole thing was a hoax. According to a letter written by
Lorenzen: “He [Allende] was on his way to Denver... and after talking to us for
hours, admitted he had made up the whole thing. We even obtained a signed
statement by him saying that it was a hoax.”
William Moore and Charles Berlitz rejuvenated the tale with the publication
of The Philadelphia Experiment (1979). In it, they even reprinted the famed
newspaper article but in a break from journalistic tradition, not a single name
appeared in the article. Once again the newspaper itself and the date were
missing so that no corroboration could be found.
In the years that followed, several men have come forward claiming they
were involved in the experiment. However, not one has ever provided
documentation that they were on the ship. In one case, a man claimed the Navy
had altered his life so that it would seem he was not involved.
In the end, Allende’s confession that he had invented the tale, Sherby’s
explanation of what happened at the ONR, and the lack of any evidence that the
experiment had taken place should have killed the story. The case has smacked
of a hoax from the beginning, and no evidence has ever been offered to suggest
otherwise.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
References
“Allende Letters a Hoax,” The A.P.R.O. Bulletin (July/August 1969).
Jessup, Morris K. The Case for the UFO (The Citadel Press/Bantam Books, 1955).
Moore, William L., and Berlitz, Charles. The Philadelphia Experiment (Grosset & Dunlap, 1979).
Randle, Kevin D. “Allende Letters” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New
English Library, 1980).
Steiger, Brad, and Whritenour. New UFO Breakthrough (Award Books, 1968).
America West Airline sighting On the night of May 25, 1995, veteran
Captain Eugene Tollefson and First Officer John J. Waller, in charge of
America West Flight #564 on a routine trip from Tampa, Florida, to Las Vegas,
Nevada, encountered a UFO. At 10:25 MDT, two-thirds of the way through its
planned four and one-half hour flight, the Boeing 757 was cruising smoothly at
39,000 feet, and passing near Bovina, Texas. A stratus overcast stretched some
8000 feet below the aircraft while to the northeast an active thunderstorm cell
loomed, topping off some 1000 feet above it.
Suddenly the attention of the lead flight attendant, sitting in the cabin behind
the pilot, was drawn to a line of flashing lights in the sky to the north of and
below the airliner. Both the flight attendant and first officer then observed a
horizontal row of eight strobe-like lights, flashing on and off in a sequence
from left to right.
Appearing “bright white with a tint of blue” and having the brilliance of
landing lights, the row seemed to be at an altitude of 30,000 to 35,000 feet.
Although Capt. Tollefson had to leave his seat to observe the lights, he too
noted their sequencing from left to right. Ultimately, the westward progression
of the airliner caused the UFO to be situated in front of the thunderhead, whose
lightning discharges silhouetted the strange object. Seen from this aspect, the
UFO appeared to the first officer as a dark wingless cigar 300 to 400 feet long,
with lights disposed along its length, and perhaps 22 miles distant. Tollefson
felt the object might have been closer, with a 400- to 500-foot length. The
object was in view for approximately five minutes.
UFO observed by America West pilots (Drawing by Susan Swiatek)
Although the air crew immediately contacted the Albuquerque Air Route
Traffic Control Center to report the sighting, a flight controller stated that no
unknown object was being picked up on radar; several airplanes in the vicinity
of Flight #564 likewise were not able to spot the strange strobing lights.
NORAD’s western headquarters, alerted by Albuquerque ARTCC to the
presence of the unknown aircraft, initially indicated they were tracking a
nontransponding radar target in the vicinity of Flight #564. However, NORAD
subsequently received a transponder code identifying this target as a specific
aircraft.
Longtime researcher Walter N. Webb, working with a grant from the UFO
Research Coalition, conducted an extensive investigation of the Flight #564
incident, ultimately acquiring the voice tape communications between the 757
and Albuquerque ARTCC, but was unable to resolve the UFO as any known
meteorological phenomenon or manmade aircraft. It remains unexplained.
The case was profiled in 1995 on the TV show Sightings and is detailed in a
report by Webb published by the UFO Research Coalition.
—ROBERT SWIATEK
Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Henry Regnery, 1965). Jacques Vallée begins

his distinguished career as a UFO investigator and theorist with this book,
analyzing historical reports of UFOs to discern common themes in the effects on
machines and people. Among his many astute observations: the period 1914 to
1946 featured few UFO reports, yet it was “one of the richest periods in science
fiction stories of all kinds.” This leads him to believe there is little substance to
the notion that UFO rumors are spread by public intoxication with science
fiction ideas.
Ancient Astronaut and SETI Society (AAS) Originally known as the

Ancient Astronaut Society (founded in 1973 by Dr. Gene Phillips), the AAS is
the principal organization that supports the ancient astronaut theory of Erich von
Däniken, et al. The AAS organizes conferences, seminars, and field trips, some
of which are guided by von Däniken himself.
Their main areas of interest are quoted as follows:
• The origins of life on Earth

• The origins of intelligence on Earth
• The origins of religions
• The original core of global mythologies
• The description of gods in ancient texts
• The depiction of :judgments of the gods” in prehistoric times
• The legendary ancient kings and ancestors in old Sumerian texts and sacred
scriptures
• The vanishing of religious and mythological beings “into the heavens”
• The issue of God and the Devil, the ancient symbols of good and evil
• The promises of a “return” in all religions and the fear mankind has of this
event
• The time-shift mentioned in a number of ancient texts
• The construction and motivation of structures from prehistoric times for
which there is as yet no explanation
• The earliest offerings for the appeasement of the gods
• The origins of ancient religious symbols and cults
• The origins of related rock carvings around the globe
• The origins of similar figurines of gods
• The origins of worldwide giant ground drawings and hill figures which are
designed in such a way that they can only be seen from the air
Membership is the AAS is open to all.

P.O. Box 818
Address: Ithaca, N.Y. 14851
U.S.A.
CH-3803 Beatenberg
Address:
Switzerland
Web site: www.aas-fg.org
ancient astronaut theory The ancient astronaut or space-god theory

proposes that intelligent, humanoid beings from outer space came to Earth in
the distant past, created man in their image, and then went on to develop human
civilization. Reports (i.e., legends and references by early historians) of ancient
UFOs and alleged biblical UFO sightings are generally assumed by space-god
proponents to be connected with ancient astronauts, thereby making it a theory
of ancient contactees.
Author Erich von Däniken, the most popular spokesman for the movement,
states the theory as follows: “In prehistoric and early historic times the Earth
was visited by unknown beings from the Cosmos. These unknown beings
created human intelligence by a deliberate genetic mutation. The
extraterrestrials ennobled hominids ‘in their own image.’ That is why we
resemble them—not they us. These visits to Earth by alien beings from the
Cosmos were recorded and handed down in religions, mythologies and popular
legends. In some places the extraterrestrials also deposited physical signs of
their presence on Earth.” (Von Däniken’s Proof, 1978)
Hints of the theory can be found in the writings of Charles Fort, who once
said “we are property,” in the context that extraterrestrial beings might be
watching over us earth-lings as a farmer would cattle or sheep. Another early
proponent of ancient astronauts was astronomer Morris K. Jessup, who began
to develop the idea in his book The Case for the UFO (1955).
It was not until 1960, however, that most of the “classic” or standard
examples of alleged extraterrestrial evidence in ancient times was enumerated
and synthesized by the French authors Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in
their book The Morning of the Magicians. Other books followed, such as The
Sky People by Brinsley Le Poer Trench (1960); Paul Thomas’ Flying Saucers
Through the Ages (1962); Robert Charroux’s One Hundred Thousand Years of
Man’s Unknown History (1963); and more recently, the whole series of books
by von Däniken, beginning with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968, followed by
another series of books by Zecharia Sitchin (beginning in 1976), known
collectively as the “Earth Chronicles.”
To von Däniken, this rock painting from Tin-Tazarift in the Tassili mountains
most likely represents an ancient astronaut “wearing a close-fitting spacesuit
with steering gear on his shoulders and antennae on his protective helmet.”
Could this 14th century fresco from the Desani Monastery in Jugoslavia represent an ancient
space traveler?
Although there is nothing absurd or impossible about the idea that ancient
astronauts could have visited the Earth, the theory suffers from a lack of
evidence that unambiguously links anything with extrater-restrrials.
Discrepancies found in the books of von Däniken and others who have
supported the ancient astronaut thesis can be categorized, for the most part, as
follows: (1) speculations built on grossly inaccurate or misleading premises; (2)
playing the game “it looks like”; and (3) omissions of pertinent information that
if known would indicate a very different conclusion.
For example: a Mexican sarcophagus lid that supposedly depicts a man
piloting a rocket is actually a deceased Mayan ruler by the name of Lord Shield
Pacal who, in the stone carving, is shown against the background of a corn
plant (which has been verified by comparisons with other examples of Mayan
art); the giant statues on Easter Island, which proponents of ancient astronauts
claim could only have been constructed with the aid of extraterrestrials, are
known to have been carved by the natives themselves (verified by experiments
conducted by Thor Heyerdahl on his famous Easter Island expedition in 1955-
56); and a series of events (related by von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods?)
interpreted as an “eyewitness account of a space trip” supposedly contained in
the Epic of Gilgamesh that, upon reading the entire Gilgamesh epic, one does
not find!
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Story, Ronald D. The Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row, 1976; New English Library, 1977).
________. Guardians of the Universe? (St. Martin’s Press/New English Library, 1980).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (G. P. Putnam’s Sons,1970; Bantam Books, 1971).
________. Gods From Outer Space (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971; Bantam Books, 1972)
________. Von Däniken’s Proof (Bantam Books, 1978).
ancient UFOs There is no question but that strange aerial objects have been
described in roughly similar terms for thousands of years. Unknown lights and
shapes seen in the sky, strange beings making contact with humans—these
mysteries are a part of man’s oldest art and literature. And although we should
view the very early reports with caution, it would be unreasonable to ignore
them.
References are found all over the world, in ancient legends and written
histories, of strange happenings in the sky. “Fiery globes” fluttering about the
night sky, “circular shields” during the day—that is how the ancient Greeks and
Romans described what they saw. The Egyptians of 3500 years ago left
accounts of “circles of fire” and “flaming chariots” that sailed across the
heavens. The American Indians had their legends of “flying canoes” and “great
silvery airships” in the days of the covered wagons. Such accounts have been
handed down through the ages by nearly all peoples of the world: from ancient
Egypt, India, Tibet, Japan, China, Scandinavia, Ireland, England, France, Italy,
Polynesia, and the Americas.
The following examples are quoted by the British author Harold T. Wilkins,
in his book Flying Saucers on the Attack (1954), from reportedly ancient
sources:
216 B.C.: Things like ships were seen in the sky, over Italy. ...At Arpi (180
Roman miles, east of Rome, in Apulia), a round shield was seen in the sky.
214 B.C.: The forms of ships seen in the sky at Rome.
213 B.C.: At Hadria (Gulf of Venice), the strange spectacle of men with white
clothing was seen in the sky. They seemed to stand around an altar, and
were robed in white.
170 B.C.: At Lanupim (on the Appian Way, 16 miles from Rome), a
remarkable spectacle of a fleet of ships was seen in the air.
In November 1969, there appeared an intriguing article entitled “Paleolithic

UFO Shapes,” by the French UFOlogist Aimé Michel in the British Flying
Saucer Review (Vol. 15, No.6). Michel had found that our Magdalenian
ancestors fashioned works of art that are striking indications that they too had
seen UFOs. On the walls of the famous les Eyzies, Laseaux, and Altamira
caves in France and Spain are found renderings of objects that clearly resemble
modern descriptions (and photographs) of disk-shaped UFOs. Just what the
Magdalenian artists were attempting to portray—15,000 to 30,000 years ago—
may never be known. But, without a definitive explanation, the UFO
interpretation must at least be considered as a possibility.
Many more examples of ancient UFO interpretations can be found in the
books of Desmond Leslie, Morris K. Jessup, W. Raymond Drake, et al.
—RONALD D. STORY
Andreasson abductions The UFO-related experiences and associated

paranormal phenomena experienced by Betty (Andreasson) Luca and members
of her family. Raymond Fowler’s research over a period of twenty years is
broken down into five separate investigative phases. During this inquiry, it
gradually became apparent that Ray and his family also bore distinctive
benchmarks of the UFO abduction phenomenon. The five phases of the
investigation are published in five consecutive books: The Andreasson Affair
(1979), The Andreasson Affair, Phase Two (1982), The Watchers (1990), The
Watchers II (1993), and The Andreasson Legacy (1997). A synopsis follows:
Betty (Andreasson) Luca
PHASE I
Phase I of the investigation took place between January 1977 and January
1978. Betty Ann Luca (then Mrs. James Andreasson) reported a UFO
experience to J. Allen Hynek in response to an article that mentioned his
interest in receiving such reports. Dr. Hynek referred her letter to the
Massachusetts chapter of MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network). After an initial
interview, a team was put together to investigate Betty’s reported experience. In
addition to Ray Fowler, the Phase I MUFON team consisted of a physicist, an
aerospace engineer, an electrical engineer, a telecommunications specialist, a
professional hypnotist, a lie detector specialist, and a medical doctor (as a
consultant).
Betty’s report to Dr. Hynek described only her conscious memories and
those of her father, Waino Aho (since deceased). The date was January 25,
1967. At that time, Betty and her family resided in the small Massachusetts
town of South Asburnham. She was in the kitchen when the event began. Her
seven children, together with her mother and father, were in the living room.
Her husband, James, was in the hospital recovering from an automobile
accident.
At about 6:35 P.M. the house lights suddenly began to flicker and then
blinked out. A pulsating pink, then reddish-orange light shone through the
kitchen window; and a strange vacuum-like feeling settled over the house, as if
time was standing still.
Betty told her frightened children to remain in the living room while her
father checked to see where the light was coming from. When he looked out the
window, he saw a group of strange-looking small humanoid creatures coming
toward the house moving with a strange floating, jumping motion. As they
passed by the window, one of the entities looked at him. He remembered
nothing after that, as he was placed in what can only be termed as a state of
suspended animation.
The five entities passed through the solid kitchen door and confronted Betty.
As they passed through the door, they seemed to fade in and out of reality. This
was essentially Betty’s conscious memory of the experience. However, during
fourteen sessions of time-regression hypnosis, both Betty and her daughter
relived what they think occurred after the entities entered the house.
The rest of Betty’s family was placed in a state of suspended animation. The
entities commanded Betty to follow them outside. Betty felt strangely
compelled to go with them but was concerned for her family. The entities then
temporarily released Betty’s oldest daughter, Becky, from her suspended state
to assure Betty that her family would be all right. Becky relived this segment of
the encounter under hypnosis.
Betty floated through the solid-wood kitchen door in line with four of the
entities. One entity was left behind. Under hypnosis, Becky remembered this
entity again releasing her from suspended animation to ask questions about the
rooms in the house and to amuse her with floating balls of light.
Outside, Betty was brought to a small oval-shaped craft on tripod landing
gear, whereupon she floated into it. The craft accelerated upward and
apparently entered a much larger craft. While on board she was subjected to the
effects of strange equipment before and after a physical examination.
During the examination, a tiny BB-like object was removed from her nose.
Attempts via hypnosis to learn how it got there were unsuccessful. Betty
became terrorized during these probes and the hypnotist refused to press the
matter further.
After the exam, Betty was placed into a tank of liquid and made to drink
another liquid that had a tranquilizing effect. Soon after, she was removed from
the tank and floated along a track into an alien place. While there, she
underwent a traumatic experience during an encounter with a holographic-like
portrayal of the death and rebirth of the legendary Phoenix bird.
During this experience, a booming chorus of voices told Betty that she had
been chosen to show something important to the world. She then was returned
home to find her family still in a state of suspended animation and guarded by
the entity that was left behind.
Betty and her family, under mind control of the entities, were put to bed in a
state of unawareness. Betty was told that she would forget her experience until
an appointed time. During the abduction the entities related to Betty that:
humans would fear them, but they were here to help the human race; human
time is localized and they were not bound by time; their technology is para-
physical in nature, and man is not made of just flesh and blood.
The MUFON team was able to verify a number of facts associated with the
initial segment of Betty’s UFO abduction experience, including the power
blackout and the approximate time that the incident began.
Some of Betty Luca’s own drawings of the entities she encountered.
Under hypnosis, Betty related that the event occurred in 1967 on a

Wednesday. She stated that her husband was in a Veteran’s Administration
Hospital and that her parents were visiting to help out. She described the
weather as balmy with traces of snow on the ground, melting and causing the
neighborhood to be enshrouded with fog.
Betty’s drawing of a disk-shaped craft into which she was taken.
Betty’s husband’s hospital records showed that he was in the hospital

between January 23 and March 17, 1967. A local weather station in South
Ashburnham recorded a temperature of 33 to 54 degrees with mist rising from
melting snow. Betty’s parents remembered the visit, and her father remembered
his brief, conscious look at the entities, which he described as “Halloween
freaks.”
The local power company confirmed the power failure and attributed it to an
open circuit breaker, apparently tripped by an overloaded circuit. Unfortunately,
the power company records did not give the time of the power outage. The time
was established by other data.
Prior to the encounter, Betty’s children were watching a show on TV that
featured Bozo the Clown. A check of TV records revealed that this show aired
between 4:30 and 5:30 P.M. on that date. Since it was dark outside when the
event began, the time of sunset was checked. This turned out to be 4:48 P.M.
Under hypnosis, Becky remembered that it was around 6:35 P.M. when the lights
went out.
Betty’s credibility was established through a character reference check, a lie-
detector test, and a psychiatric interview. Only the weather, television show,
and the power failure could be proved as objective reality. However, Betty’s
(and Becky’s) reliving of the account was consistent during an interrogation,
and while having her repeat various segments of their experience while under
hypnosis. Her description of the entities and her experience were also
consistent with other abduction reports.
PHASE II
Phase II of the investigation took place between June 1978 and June 1980.
In addition to Ray Fowler, the investigative team consisted of a physicist and a
behavioral psychologist.
The Phase I investigation had come to a halt because Betty had moved to
Florida to live with relatives after her marriage ended. Her first husband, James
Andreasson, was a childhood sweetheart who had returned from service in the
Navy as an alcoholic. Betty had lived a rocky life with the ups and downs of
this disease and had sought help for him many times. However, the time came
when he decided to leave her for the family’s own good. Attempts to change his
mind had been futile.
During her stay in Florida, Betty met Bob Luca. Bob and a friend had been
on a cross-country trip to California. Bob had never intended to return to his
home in Connecticut via Florida, but he suddenly had a compulsion to visit
friends there. Coincidentally, Bob’s friends turned out to be mutual friends of
Betty’s. In fact, they were people Betty worked with. They also told him about
Betty’s UFO experience.
He was very interested in meeting her, as he also had a UFO sighting,
followed by missing time, in the summer of 1967. At that time he was on his
way to a beach near Wallingford, Connecticut, when he noticed a railroad crew
looking up at two large silver cylindrical objects. He stopped the car and
watched as the cylinders released smaller disk-shaped objects.
After the objects were out-of-sight, he continued to drive to the beach but
was distressed when he arrived late with about two hours of missing time.
Bob was introduced to Betty, who informed the MUFON team of his UFO
experience, and arrangements were made to conduct an investigation of his
“missing time” as well. Bob and Betty were later married.
The team obtained the services of a MUFON consultant in hypnosis living
in Connecticut, and Bob underwent two sessions in which he was hypnotically
regressed.
During the first session, the hypnotist asked Bob to go back to his first UFO
experience. We were amazed when he began reliving an encounter that had
taken place at age five, in 1944. Bob began speaking like a child. He said he
was sitting on a swing in the back yard, behind his house. He noticed a bright
light coming in the sky. When it got close, he described an oval object with two
gray entities in a bubble-like dome on top. They flashed a light at him, which
induced paralysis. They told him telepathically that they were visiting others
like him to help people not to be afraid of them. He was told that someday
something good would happen to him, when he was older.
During the second session under hypnosis, Bob relived driving to the beach
and watching the cylindrical objects release smaller objects. However, when he
began driving to the beach, one of the smaller objects appeared and began
descending like a falling leaf towards his car. The car was suddenly filled with
red light and he found himself in the craft with small, gray alien beings. He
could not resist their wishes. They had him remove his clothes and then placed
him on a table, where he underwent a physical examination. While on the table
he became terrified when one of the gray entities suddenly turned into a being
of light. He refused to describe one of the procedures that the entities were
performing on him. He was brought out of hypnosis and refused to undergo
further sessions.
Betty underwent seven more sessions under hypnosis. Coincidentally, Betty
also relived her first remembered UFO-related experience at age seven, in
1944, at Leominster, Massachusetts. While waiting for a friend in a playhouse,
a buzzing glowing marble-sized object flew in and landed between Betty’s
eyes. She felt tired and experienced a strange feeling in her head, as a chorus of
voices told her that she was being watched and was making good progress. She
was told that they were getting some things ready to show her and that it would
make her and other people happy. These things would not be ready until she
was 12 years of age.
Her second encounter took place at age 12, in 1949, when she lived in
Westminster, Massachusetts. While walking in the woods, she was confronted
by a small gray entity in a strange coverall suit with buttons and symbols on it.
The entity pressed a button on the suit and a glowing marble-sized ball of light
flew out and landed between Betty’s eyes. Again she heard voices which said
that she was not ready yet and that what they were preparing for her would
happen in another year.
True to the entities’ statement, when Betty was 13, in 1950, she was whisked
up into an “orb-shaped” craft while walking in a field. The entities told her they
were taking her home to meet the “One.”
They placed an instrument in her mouth that held her tongue down and
placed her on a smooth rubber-like wheel. The craft took her to an underground
installation, which was entered by going underwater. There she witnessed a
Museum of Time consisting of lifelike (or real) people from different ages,
encased in transparent cubicles.
The entities then caused Betty to undergo an out-of-body experience (OBE).
In this state of being, she was told to enter a huge glass door. Through it she
entered into a “world of light” and there encountered the One.
Under hypnosis, her face beamed in ecstasy as she described a feeling of
unconditional love and a oneness with all things. Attempts to discover other
things that she learned there were futile.
She was also subjected to a number of tests including being trained on a
console. During the physical examination, the entities removed her eye and
inserted a tiny object in her head through the eye cavity, which would be
removed 17 years later.
Follow-on hypnotic sessions revealed that in 1961, at age 24, a strange force
drew Betty from her home into the woods, where she encountered a tall gray
entity. She was told not to be afraid, that the Lord was with her and that her
faith in the light would bring many others to the light. She was warned of
upcoming trials but to keep her faith for the Lord Jesus was with her.
Phase II of the investigation came to a halt due to a painful mental block
when Betty started to relive her next UFO experiences in the 1970s. This pain
frightened her so much that she refused to undergo further hypnosis. She felt
that the entities did not want her to relate these experiences at this time.
PHASE III
Phase III of the investigation took place between November 1987 and
December 1988. It was conducted by Ray Fowler and a behavioral
psychologist. At this time, Betty began experiencing dreams and memory
flashbacks of a woman’s face. What disquieted her so much was the expression
of intense fear on the woman’s face. The eyes of the woman literally cried out
to her for help. Betty tried her utmost to remember who the woman was, as she
felt that she had seen her somewhere before.
Betty decided that she would undergo hypnosis again to find out who the
woman was, in spite of the chance that she would undergo a painful block
again. An initial hypnotic session was not painful and revealed the woman was
related to Betty’s UFO experiences.
This instigated 17 new hypnotic sessions, which revealed a number of UFO
experiences involving both Betty and Bob Luca. It was during these sessions
that the entities told Betty that they were the “Watchers.”
In 1973, at age 36, Betty described a bedroom visitation by an entity who
informed her that it was now time to begin to remember her previous
experiences and what she had been told.
In 1975, at age 38, Betty again experienced a bedroom visitation by an entity
who told her that her first marriage would end and to prepare for hardships.
In 1977, at age 40, during yet another bedroom visitation by an entity, Betty
was told about the impending death of two of her sons. Later, they were both
killed in an automobile accident.
In 1978, at age 41, Betty described and shared an OBE abduction with her
husband Bob. They were taken to a large round-shaped facility where they
witnessed many incredible things, including an alien operation on three family
members. During this same year, Betty, Bob, and one of her daughters sighted
four UFOs from their car.
Between 1981 and 1986, Betty described several occasions where alien
entities were sighted in her bedroom at night.
In 1986, at age 49, Betty was suddenly confronted by an entity during the
day, as she lay on the couch. The entity placed a black box on the couch, which
precipitated an OBE abduction experience.
In 1987, at age 50, Betty discovered an anomalous scoop mark on the calf of
her right leg. Three more scoop marks appeared on her arm, in 1988. During
the same week a scoop mark appeared overnight on Ray Fowler’s right leg,
after a dream of being operated on by alien entities.
Ray’s personal physician referred him to a dermatologist, who said it looked
like a “punch-biopsy” in the process of healing. The appearance of the scoop
mark further instigated Ray to undergo hypnosis himself to explore personal
childhood and adult experiences. Ray decided to include samples of personal
UFO and paranormal events experienced by himself and family members
within the context of the Phase III investigation.
PHASE IV
The Phase IV investigation took place between November 1992 and April
1993. It was conducted by Ray Fowler and a behavioral psychologist. During
this period Betty underwent seven hypnotic regression sessions and Bob was
involved in four sessions.
One of the priorities in this particular phase of the investigation was to
regress Bob Luca to relive his side of his shared OBE abduction experience, in
1978, with Betty. When under hypnosis, Bob provided additional information
about his personal interfaces with the entities. This included a detailed treatise
on the survival of human beings after death, of which the entities had intimate
knowledge. He also provided a complementary description of what he and
Betty experienced while together.
In addition, Bob recounted a number of times that he awoke to see entities
nearby. Such experiences took place in 1981 during a camping trip and in 1985,
1986, and 1992 in their home. However, each time when eye contact occurred
between himself and an entity, he would fall back to sleep.
Bob also relived abduction in 1989. He was awakened by the bed shaking
and a bright red light coming through the window. His attempts to awake Betty
were futile. When an entity appeared beside the bed, Bob became paralyzed.
The entity placed his hand on Bob’s forehead and then poured some liquid into
his mouth, which caused Bob to calm down. He then floated with the entity out
the window into a hovering craft, and placed on a table where he was
examined. He was told that they were monitoring his progress. During the
examination a metal strap was placed on Bob’s head which produced a variety
of pictures in his mind.
Betty continued to relive in detail a number of follow-on personal
abductions and a shared abduction from a car with Bob, in 1989. During a
personal OBE abduction from her bed also in 1989, Betty was taken to a craft
where she saw her daughter Becky being trained on a console. She was also
brought back to Earth with a human-like robed entity in an OBE state where
she was allowed to see him carry out several interfaces with events on Earth.
During another abduction in 1989, Betty was taken in a small craft to a huge
cylindrical craft in space, where she described a number of operations being
carried out by the robed human-like entities and their small humanoid gray
surrogates.
In addition to probing Betty and Bob’s memories of their UFO experiences,
the Phase IV investigation included a detailed comparison between OBE
abductions and the NDE (near-death experience). This resulted in the
possibility that humankind were the larval form of the human-like entities
encountered during OBE UFO abductions and NDEs. It hinted that the physical
abductions and so-called animal mutilations were analogous to the breeding
and maintenance of the human larval form.
This would mean that so-called physical death might be the ultimate
abduction: the reception of the metamorphosed larval form into the plane of
existence from which the UFO phenomenon originates. Fowler theorized that
this would explain why the entities appeared to be so similar in appearance to
Homo Sapiens, and why OBE abductions and some NDE reports were
identical. This concept was also supported by a treatise on human afterlife
given to Bob Luca during his shared OBE abduction with Betty, in 1978.
PHASE V
The Phase V investigation took place between November 1993 and February
1995. It was conducted by Ray Fowler and a MUFON consultant in hypnosis.
The inquiry was directed specifically at probing the hidden memories of
Becky’s daughter and Bob Luca, and another probable abductee that was
selected at random for comparative purposes.
In addition to recording hypnotic recall, interviews with members of the
Luca and Fowler families took place. The experiences of both families were
recorded and analyzed. Results supported other researchers’ findings that UFO
abductions are a family phenomenon, and other types of paranormal
phenomena usually accompany UFO experiences. Based on these findings, it
was theorized that UFOs and various types of paranormal phenomena might be
singular components of one overall metaphenomenon.
Under hypnosis, Becky relived childhood and adult UFO experiences. Her
earliest memories went back to 1958 when she was only three years of age. The
early abductions were conducted by the robed human-like entities who took her
from her crib by a beam of light into a craft, where she was examined with an
African-American child. It was at this time that she was returned to her
backyard sandbox in the early morning hours, rather than to her crib. This
caused great alarm to her mother, who could not understand how she could
have gotten outside of a locked house.
A scar remains from an apparent biopsy taken during her childhood
abductions. During these early abductions, Becky relived her experience with
the entity that was left in the house during Betty’s 1967 abduction. Her adult
abductions were conducted by the typical small gray entities. During both
childhood and adult abductions, Becky was trained on a console with a TV
screen-like monitor. Becky attributes her ability to write strange hieroglyphic-
type writing to these training sessions.
Bob relived several other abduction episodes, such as being taken from his
bed and out a closed window by a small red-suited gray entity in a buzzing
beam of light. During another childhood bedtime episode, he suddenly found
himself in a strange lighted room with his mother and father, and small gray
entities that performed examinations on them.
He also relived his 1967 adult experience, where he was taken from his car
while on the way to a beach. During past hypnotic sessions, when probing this
event, a mental block was encountered where Bob refused to describe what the
entities were doing to him. However, during this session, the block was
neutralized. Bob became very upset as he described entities extracting semen
from him.
One of the priorities of the Phase V investigation was to probe a recurring
dream of Bob seeing an alien child. under hypnosis, Bob emotionally recalled
being in a place where there was a large hallway. A gray entity emerged with an
alien-like child with blue eyes, which somehow Bob recognized as his own.
Bob was not allowed to go close to the child and sobbed uncontrollably when
the child was taken away.
During the Phase V investigation, Ray Fowler decided to include one of the
many suspected abductees that had phoned him for help. He wanted to see
whether she would relive similar UFO and paranormal events as the Luca and
Fowler families. The similitude of the results was extraordinary.
Jean (a pseudonym) was selected and relived both childhood and adult UFO
and paranormal experiences in excruciating detail. Of great interest was her
being used as a surrogate mother for three fetuses and being brought to see and
hold them at a later date.
Like Betty, Jean saw other surrogate mothers onboard the craft who were
undergoing gynecological procedures. She, like members of the Luca and
Fowler family, had experienced a variety of psychic phenomena.
Fowler’s continuing investigation into his own family uncovered a variety of
UFO and paranormal phenomena experienced by them. A highlight event was
the discovery that his father, brother, and his brother’s son also had pronounced
scoop marks just above their shins. His brother recalled remnants of an
abduction experience from a motel room, which coincided with the appearance
of the scoop mark. Ray’s father did not remember when the mark had appeared
and was unaware of it until it was pointed out to him. His nephew could not
recall anything about the strange scoop marks on his leg.
Phase V was the culmination of a twenty-year investigation of the
Andreasson abductions. The result is a collection of conversations between the
abductees and their alien abductors, which have been recorded as their message
to humankind in the book, The Andreasson Legacy (1997).
—RAYMOND E. FOWLER
References
Fowler, Raymond E.. The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979; Bantam Books, 1980).
________. The Andreasson Affair, Phase Two (Prentice-Hall, 1982).
________. The Watchers: The Secret Design Behind UFO Abduction (Bantam, 1990).
________. The Watchers II: Exploring UFOs and the Near Death Experience (Wild Flower Press, 1993).
________. The Andreasson Legacy (Marlowe, 1997).
POSTSCRIPT: The following is Betty (Andreasson) Luca’s own summary of her

extraterrestrial encounters: Since the beginning I have believed that extremely
intelligent extraterrestrials have coexisted with mankind, quietly touching the
human life and mind, hoping to lead man into a higher path of consciousness
where wisdom, love, and freedom abound.
Many people fear and mistrust these entities, because of their covert
influence. I have had several physical and spiritual close encounters. Most all
the beings I’ve been involved with, for well over fifty years of UFO
encounters, have been benevolent.
In 1967, as I lay magnetically pinned to a table aboard an extraterrestrial
craft, several dark eyed entities, having three fingers on each hand, vigorously
measured me for light and procreation, before retrieving a BB-like implant
from my nose.
My mind fearfully grasped for answers as I questioned their intention,
purpose, and attitude concerning such a peculiar and frightful examination.
I soon realized although these physical probes and unusual methods were
bizarre, the beings did not want to hurt me in any way, for they removed the
pain by laying their hands on my forehead. I reasoned that their radical
examination was no more puzzling, painful or embarrassing than many
necessary medical operations humans endure from physicians, surgeons, and
dentists.
Knowledge of these extraterrestrial creatures capable of transformation and
invisibility began at age seven and continues to this day. My first abduction in
1950 thrust me into a realm where denizens of small gray skinned beings dwell,
whose enlarged heads and big black eyes seemed grotesque compared to the
human form.
In this scene from Betty’s 1967 encounter, the leader, “Quazgaa,” exchanges a magical book for
the Bible.
In their strange environment was a beautiful crystal forest with amazing

powers that came alive through touch. Beyond the forest was a huge crystal-
like door. This was the entrance into the beautiful world of Light where the
magnificence of One reside. Words are inadequate and incapable of describing
the glorious and majestic presence within the dimensions of Light. Upon my
exit from the great door, I was greeted by a tall, white-haired being who placed
me in a small transport craft to return to the main ship.
While on my journey back home, an implant was strategically placed inside
my head which would be removed seventeen years into my future. After the
removal I was taken to a room with eight unusual chairs, submersed in liquid
for protection from G-forces, then escorted to a high place before the Light
where a chorus of one voice called my name to inform me that I had been
chosen to show the world. Six more years would pass before I would come to
understand what the intriguing statement meant.
A huge cigar-shaped craft, which carries the Elders and the Watchers.
Through each encounter, they were revealing themselves: who they were,
what they were doing, and why. I had been chosen to report the impact of their
reality through my encounters.
In 1973, the gray beings summoned me from my home to their craft where a
young terrified woman lay paralyzed on a table. Much to my surprise, some of
the beings were working down by her raised legs.
A hybrid fetus was aborted from the woman’s womb and thrust into a
waiting tank of liquid close by. It was at this time I learned these gray beings
were called “Watchers”: care takers of nature and all natural form. They
informed me the reason they’d been collecting seed and fetuses was because
man would eventually become sterile.
I witnessed technology that seemed magical. A large hovering craft attached
itself to a smaller craft below to purge and reline its “cyclinetic trowel,” which
caused lightning and a rain shower to occur. The lower craft was later shrunken
to the size of a car.
Watchers escorted me back to the main craft, where I was lifted to an upper
room and brought to a huge forest-like terrarium with a fish pond. The central
part of the water opened, and as water and fish fell below, the Watcher
explained: “they were just replenishing.” I stood in the forest in amazement as
tiny fetus-like children, remarkable hybrid infants, appeared from behind
bushes and trees.
The next unusual encounter was an out-of-body (OBE) event that happened
to both my husband, Bob, and me. We were lifted out of our bodies and brought
aboard a craft where the gray Watchers were examining our three daughters.
Two tall white-haired beings took Bob into a different room, as I along with
others were changed into beings of light. This experience was an advanced
learning session for us.
Betty’s drawing of an Elder: one of the white-robed beings.
In 1989, I was once again transported to a craft by the gray Watchers and
brought to the crystal forest. The ground rumbled and great sheets of blinding
light suddenly appeared as the great door to the world of Light opened once
again
A spherical craft transported me forward, where I saw a mass of nesting
orbs. These orbs were collectors of wisdom, knowledge, and intelligence.
Watchers escorted me to another spherical craft, and we sailed toward a
massive cigar-shaped vehicle hovering in the darkness of space. One end of the
huge ship was lit with red and white lights. As we entered the long cylindrical
craft and parked the small ship, a tall white-robed being greeted us.
Once inside, I learned that these beautiful pale blue-eyed extraterrestrials are
called Elders, and are ambassadors of “O.” The gray Watchers are their work
force. These Elders love the human race.
—BETTY ANN LUCA
P.O. Box 613

Address: Hayes, VA 23072 U.S.A.
E-mail: bluca@pilot.infi.net
Andreasson Affair, The (Prentice-Hall, 1979). Raymond Fowler tells the

story of Betty Andreasson, a Massachusetts housewife, who believes she was
kidnapped by aliens and given religious messages and formulas for new
technologies to benefit humankind. Her account of being subjected to medical
tests by the aliens and having an implant removed from her sinuses came from
hypnotic regression sessions and became a defining experience for later
abductees and their hypnotists.
Andrews, Arlan K., Sr. (b. 1940). Dr. Andrews is an author, lecturer, and
consultant, living on Padre Island on the Texas Gulf coast. A native of Little
Rock, Arkansas, he retired in 1996 as Manager of Advanced Manufacturing
Initiatives at the Sandia National Laboratories of the U.S. Department of
Energy, Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a co-founder of Muse Technologies,
Inc., a virtual-reality software firm (NASDAQ: MUZE), and several other
high-tech start-up companies.
Arlan Andrews
Dr. Andrews received his Doctor of Science in Engineering at New Mexico

State University in 1968, and worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories at White
Sands Missile Range, New Mexico; Greensboro, North Carolina; and
Indianapolis, Indiana, with assignments in Hong Kong and Japan.
He worked as a Fellow in the Technology Administration of the U.S.
Department of Commerce in 1991-92, and in the White House Science Office
(Office of Science and Technology Policy) during the Bush and Clinton
Administrations in 1992-93, making him the only UFO researcher with White
House credentials. He is a Registered Professional Engineer, a Mechanical
Engineering consultant for MUFON and a professional member of the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
arlan@thingsto.com
E-mail:
POSITION STATEMENT: My basic outlook on UFOs has not changed since my

original position statement in The Encyclopedia of UFOs (1980):
“My own interpretation is with the hardware group: I think that the data
reveal that we are visited by craft from other solar systems or elsewhere in
space, and that these craft have advanced means of propulsion and
materialization, and that the crews are (sometimes) humanoid, and that they are
neutral—neither friends nor foes. It is almost meaningless to speculate further
upon their motives.”
In the years since 1980, most scientific discoveries and technological
advancements have unknowingly supported this “Hardware and Extraterrestrial
Hypothesis.” For example, we now possess “stealth technology,” which means
that UFOs of the 20th century did not have to show up on our radar, lending
more credence to such reports. Extrasolar planets are showing up everywhere,
and recent lab experiments indicate that the speed of light may not be the
ultimate barrier after all. Advances in nanotechnology and genetic research are
making 21st Century technology look like magic to a 1950s observer. Each of
these steps supports a universe in which interstellar travel is indeed possible.
It is very interesting, then, that no further progress has been made in
explaining UFOs since Day One in 1947. Perhaps UFOs will remain not only
unknown, but unknowable.
—ARLAN K. ANDREWS, SR.
Andrus, Walter H. Jr. (b. 1920). As one of the founding members of MUFON
in 1969, Walter Andrus served as the International Director of the Mutual UFO
Network, Inc. since 1970, succeeding Dr. Allen R. Utke. On July 16, 2000,
Andrus retired from that position, and the title was transferred to John F.
Schuessler, also a founding member of MUFON.
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Andrus graduated from the Central Technical
Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1940. He also graduated from the U.S.
Navy Electronics Technician Program (during World War II) and taught in both
of the above schools. He was formerly employed by Mid-Continent Airlines as
a Station Manager in Quincy, Illinois. From 1949 to 1975, Andrus was
employed by Motorola, Inc. in successive capacities as Assistant Plant
Manager, Manager of Quality Control, and Operations Manager in their
Quincy, Illinois facility. In 1975 he transferred to the Seguin, Texas plant as a
Production Manager. After a tenure of nearly thirty-four years with Motorola,
he retired at the end of 1982 to devote full time to the management of the
Mutual UFO Network.
Walter Andrus
The MUFON administrative offices were moved from Quincy, Illinois to

Seguin, Texas in 1975, where MUFON became a Texas Nonprofit Corporation
and an I.R.S. Tax Exempt Organization.
Andrus has been interested in the UFO phenomenon since August 15, 1948,
when he, his wife and son had a daylight sighting of four UFOs flying in
formation over downtown Phoenix, Arizona.
In addition to presenting slide-illustrated lectures in the U.S.A., Australia,
Belgium, Brazil, Canada, England, Italy, and Mexico, he has appeared on
national television numerous times, however, more recently with Oprah
Winfrey, Larry King, and Encounters.
Andrus is a member of the Board of Directors of the Joint USA-CIS Aerial
Anomaly Federation. He is also on the Board of Directors for the influential
UFO Research Coalition, composed of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO
Studies (CU-FOS), Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR), and Mutual UFO
Network (MUFON).
103 Oldtowne Road
Seguin, TX 78155
Address:
U.S.A.
Telephone: (830) 379-9216

FAX (830) 372-9439
E-mail: mufonhq@aol.com
POSITION STATEMENT: During half a century of involvement in the study of
the enigma of unidentified flying objects, I have reached certain tentative
conclusions based upon the “state of the art” of present-day science.
After personally interviewing several hundred witnesses to UFO sightings,
reviewing the 1,600 UFO landing-trace cases compiled by Ted Phillips, and
reading the 1,800 humanoid or entity cases collected by Ted Bloecher, my
initial conclusion is that our Earth is being visited by entities from an advanced
intelligence in their spacecraft conducting a surveillance of life on this planet.
Considering the giant steps that we have made in space travel during the past
twenty years, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is not only very exciting, but the
physical evidence helps to substantiate this theory.
On the other hand, I cannot lose sight of the probability that they could
constitute some unknown physical or psychological manifestation that cannot
be explained by present-day science. Evidence to support this hypothesis is
directly related to a personal daytime sighting on August 15, 1948, of four
round silver objects which my wife, son, and I observed along with numerous
other witnesses in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. The objects, while flying
slowly from east to west in formation in a cloudless sky, one at a time simply
vanished from our sight in sequence in the northern sky. After patiently
continuing to observe the sky in the direction and speed that the objects had
been traveling, the first three in formation “popped” back into our vision one at
a time in the northwest sky still moving slowly west, where they eventually
went out of sight due to distance. Considering all factors involved, these objects
had performed a feat no known object manufactured on this planet could
perform, thus meeting the requirements of a “UFO.”
Did these balloon-shaped objects “dematerialize” or change into another
dimension right before our eyes and then return a few minutes later into our
three dimensional world?
If UFOs are found to be extraterrestrial spacecraft, our aerospace engineers
would like to duplicate their propulsion systems and aerodynamic
maneuverability characteristics. If one of our aerospace industries could design
and build a craft that could duplicate the feats of a UFO, the United States
would be the unchallenged leader in the space race. We would no longer need
rockets with millions of pounds of thrust to launch vehicles to the moon and
nearby planets.
The third vital question to be answered is “where do they originate?” 1947
“kicked off” the modern era of “flying saucers,” however the Bible and other
historical writings provide evidence that UFOs have been around for several
thousand years. If they are extraterrestrial in origin, our planet has been under
surveillance for reasons known only to the creatures controlling the vehicles. If
they are from another dimension, and have the ability to “materialize” into a
“nuts and bolts” type of spacecraft, leaving physical traces, they could be
residents of this or any other habitable planet.
A question always directed to those of us involved in UFO research is, “Do
you believe in UFOs?” My response always seems to shock the recipient, when
I answer no. “Belief” has a religious connotation. I believe in God, even though
I have never seen him. When I consider UFO sightings, it is a case of looking at
the facts, data, and evidence, and arriving at the conclusion that the evidence is
overwhelming in favor of UFOs.
I am very cognizant that a phenomenon which has baffled the residents of
our tiny planet, conceivably for several thousand years, will not be resolved
tomorrow, or even next year. However, until a concerted scientific effort is
launched to deal with this perplexing dilemma, it will undoubtedly continue to
be “the greatest mystery of our time.”
—WALTER H. ANDRUS, JR.
angelic kingdom According to metaphysical theory, this is an evolutionary

line of non-physical beings, existing on Earth and in higher dimensions. The
angelic kingdom is parallel to, interactive with, but objectively independent of
the human line of evolution. These beings are said to be responsible for the
maintenance of the planet and the solar system, assisting the Creator of our
seven-dimensional system in the completion of its development. Examples
include the mythical fairies, sylphs, and archangels (such as Mikael and
Gabriel), with whom some modern channels also claim to be in contact.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Angels and Aliens (Addison-Wesley, 1991). Keith Thompson applies the

ideas of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to the UFO phenomenon and concludes
it is a mythological journey and a rite of passage for humankind to create a
Cosmic Man. Thompson delineates the patterns which connect aliens, abductees,
angels, and shamanic and near-death experiences, existing in a realm beyond
“the tenuous dimension known as ordinary reality,” and concludes these
experiences are awakening us to uncharted human capacities accelerating our
evolution as a species.
angels and UFOs There has thus far been no comprehensive study relating
Biblical angels and UFOs, although possible directions for such studies are
apparent. There are several indications that UFOs in the Bible serve as
transportation for the angels.
“And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and
came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his
garments were white as snow.”
(Matthew 28: 2,3)
UFOs in the Bible are variously referred to as “the pillar of cloud and fire”
of the Exodus, or the “chariot of fire” of Elijah, or the “bright cloud” at the
transfiguration of Jesus. Two men in white robes, understood to be angels, were
present at the ascension of Jesus (Acts 1.10). Concerning his second coming
Jesus says, “they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with
power and great glory; and he shall send his angels with a great sound of a
trumpet.” (Matt. 24:30-31)
In modern UFO studies, it is assumed by many that UFOs provide
transportation for humanoids or UFO occupants. Thus the question becomes: Is
there a relation between the Biblical angels and modern UFO occupants?
Jacques Vallée in his book Passport to Magonia (1969), has explored some
similarities between folklore and fairy stories of old, and modern UFO stories
and their human-like occupants. There are also parallels between modern UFO-
occupant stories and Biblical angels.
For instance, the Bible relates the famous story of Balaam, who while riding
his ass met an angel of God. The donkey recognized or saw the angel, but the
angel was invisible to Balaam for some time, until the angel chose to become
visible to Balaam. (Num. 22:21-35) In modern UFO literature it is often argued
that animals can sense the presence of UFOs before humans. Also, visible
UFOs are often reported to become invisible almost instantly. The New
Testament reports that an angel came into a prison cell to rescue Peter and led
Peter and himself past the first and second guard without being seen, except by
Peter. (Acts 12:1-17) The idea suggested is that angels may be visible to some
humans while invisible to others at the same time
Some modern UFO occupants have very different features from ordinary
humans, but others are reported to look very human. The Biblical angels were
understood to have the power to look very human. Thus, the Bible says: “Do
not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained
angels unawares.” (Heb. 13:2) Post-Biblical culture and art frequently picture
Biblical angels with wings, but wings are never mentioned in most angel
accounts, and, obviously, an angel with wings would hardly catch one
“unawares.”
The idea that angels were very human begins with Abraham’s meeting with
“three men” (Gen. 18:2) who meet him at noon and whom he feeds. Eventually
he discovers they are from God, and they exhibit the ability of what we call
mental telepathy, reading the mind of Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Modern UFO
occupants are sometimes given credit for the ability to read human minds and
communicate psychically. Likewise, angels in the Bible are understood to be
able to communicate strictly through psychic impressions, as when an angel
appears to Joseph, the husband of Mary, in a dream. (Matt. 2:13) Similarly, in
modern cases, witnesses involved in close-encounter cases often report
increased psychic sensitivity and suggest that the UFO reality is now
communicating with them through dreams and visions.
One other characteristic of angels of interest in the UFO field is that angels
can apparently materialize and dematerialize, or else can pass through what we
would call solid walls. Thus, in the story mentioned above of Peter in prison,
the implication of the story is that the angel entered the jail cell without
opening the door or gate. This is similar to the story of Jesus, after his
resurrection, who entered a locked room to meet his disciples. (John 20:19-29)
One can imagine a kind of “Star Trek” transporter bringing about these events,
although the Bible never explains the happenings. A Mrs. Sandy Larson of
North Dakota reported a series of UFO contacts, including one occasion when
two UFO beings awakened her from sleep and carried her right through her
bedroom wall to the waiting UFO.
This is not to say that we have proof that modern UFOs and Biblical angels
are connected, or identical. It is clear, however, that the Biblical concept of
angels involves many elements, which are familiar to students of modern UFO
stories and UFO-occupant cases. While it is true to say that there is no
scientific proof at the present time of a connection between Biblical angels and
modem UFOs, conversely, there is certainly no proof that they are independent
phenomena.
Many modern UFO cults are of a religious nature, and persons sometimes
claim to have received divine messages of salvation from UFOs. This fact has
made the “scientific” study of UFOs difficult, either because UFOs are not
scientific in the sense scientists want them to be or else because UFOs know
how to use tactics, including religious symbolism, to make them less
scientifically accessible.
—BARRY H. DOWNING
References
Downing, Barry. The Bible and Flying Saucers (Lippincott, 1968; Avon, 1970; Marlowe, 1997).
Jessup, M. K. UFO and the Bible (The Cidadel Press, 1956).
Oswald, John Paul. What You Need To Know (privately published, 1983).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia (Henry Regnery, 1969).
Angels: God’s Secret Agents (Double-day, 1975). Evangelist Billy Graham

proposes that angels may be the occupants of UFOs who have been guiding our
spiritual evolution since Biblical times. In contrast to other Christians who fear
UFOs are piloted by demons, Graham suspects they are angels sent here by
God to help us fight the demons because “the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is
close at hand.”
Angelucci, Orfeo (1912-1993). Orfeo Angelucci is a UFO contactee whose
account has attracted especial attention because of the purity of the religious
symbolism and spiritual motifs it contains. For this reason Carl G. Jung,. in his
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959), devoted
some ten pages to an analysis of the Italian-American’s UFO experience.
Angelucci’s most important book is The Secret of the Saucers, published in
1955. In this autobiographical narrative he tells us that he was raised in
comfortable circumstances in New Jersey, married in 1936, had two sons, and
moved to Los Angeles in 1948. His life was happy except for recurrent bouts of
ill health, which reduced him periodically to a state of total exhaustion and
painful nervous prostration, and in acute cases required hospitalization.
One physician attributed the condition to the effects of a childhood attack of
trichinosis. Because of this circumstance, he ended formal schooling in the
ninth grade. His mind, however, was very much alive. Angelucci as a boy and
young adult was continually performing experiments and writing theses on
esoteric scientific topics from virology to “the nature of infinite entities.”
Orfeo Angelucci
By his own account, his first saucer experience occurred on May 23, 1952.
Angelucci had felt peculiar and slightly sick throughout the day and about 11
P.M., left the swing shift early to go home from his job at the Lockheed aircraft
plant in Burbank, California. He was afraid his old illness might be coming
back. But as he drove along the bank of the Los Angeles River around
midnight, he noticed a glowing disk following him. It came closer and closer
until it virtually forced him off the road. He stopped, got out, and encountered a
supra-humanly splendid man and woman bathed in light who had come by
saucer from another world. The aliens presented Angelucci with a revivifying
drink from a crystal goblet, reminded him of events from his past, and informed
him that, despite his humble state, he had been singled out as most suitable for
the first contact of this magnificent race with the people of Earth. They spoke
of the deep compassion they had for Earth and proclaimed they wished to offer
hope to this troubled world
On a couple of later occasions, Angelucci rode the marvelous vehicles of his
friends, ringing with the music of the spheres, to their paradisal planets. The
celestial companions reaffirmed their concern for suffering humankind and the
designation of Angelucci as their evangelist. The latter’s transcendent
experience ended with his mystical marriage to a spacewoman named Lyra.
Dutifully, Angelucci commenced speaking and writing about his
experiences. Needless to say, he and his family received considerable ridicule,
but eventually he became known in more sympathetic circles and found himself
to be a fixture of space conventions and the contactee lecture circuit.
In a later book, Son of the Sun (1959), Angelucci relates the alleged
experiences (as told by him) of a person known only as Adam, but who is
described as a medical doctor from Seattle who had only a few months to live.
This narrative concerns the same entities and ships as does The Secret of the
Saucers and is replete with the same combination of romantic adventure with
transcendent quality which makes the earlier book striking; the nature of the
supernal beings and the philosophical perspective underlying them here comes
through in fuller detail.
The religious character of these encounters is reinforced by Angelucci’s
continual insistence that the visitants and their craft are not just from another
world but, in some way, from an entirely different order of reality. Their ships
could not be seen by just anyone, but only by one who is mystically prepared or
selected for the experience. On meeting them, he felt an exaltation “as though
momentarily I had transcended mortality and was somehow related to these
superior beings.” It was as though he had “felt another world, or something
akin to a whole universe.”
He tells us that we are continually under observation by the Spirit of God, by
a hierarchy of angels and heavenly hosts, and by the very highly evolved beings
he encountered—beings of other planets who are so perfected as to be “almost
angels, on the threshold.” They cannot directly help us by interfering with the
course of affairs in this world, but they can and do help indirectly by providing
a powerful hope-giving experience of transcendence, which shows how
marvelously beautiful and harmonious the infinite universe beyond darkened
Earth really is and what glorious creatures humankind can become. But even
this experience, according to Angelucei, can only be given to those able to
receive it—“only to people who already have it within them”—for otherwise it
would be an unjustifiable violation of the “divine code” of noninterference.
Orfeo Angelucci’s saucerian message, based on what were essentially
mystical experiences, is wholly one of hope and of the spaceman’s positive
spiritual meaning. To him, UFOs afford a way to inspiration and transcendence
and an assurance that for all its anguish Earth is not left alone but is part of a
living, God-pervaded universe and has godlike friends.
Orfeo Angelucci founded no organization, claimed no grandiose titles or
callings, and claimed no mystical UFO experiences after those recounted in The
Secret of the Saucers. Since then, he lived in Los Angeles, quietly and
modestly, working at various jobs and speaking about his experiences and their
meaning as occasion has allowed. His charm, humility, and sincerity were
recognized by all who knew him, and he was widely regarded as expressing the
religious wing of the UFO contactee movement at its best.
—ROBERT S. ELLWOOD, JR.
animal mutilations Toward the end of 1974 and throughout most of 1975,
newspapers across the United States carried stories of strange cattle mutilations
and their possible connection with UFOs, which in some cases had allegedly
been observed in close proximity to the time and place of these bizarre
happenings.
Hundreds of beef cattle were found dead across a section of the country as
wide-ranging as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota,
Colorado, Texas, Arizona, and California. The series of cases began in Meeker
County, Minnesota, and spread westward as law-enforcement agencies became
increasingly involved, especially in Minnesota and Colorado.
It was found initially that the vast majority of cattle deaths had resulted from
natural causes: mostly disease and malnutrition. The missing parts were those
usually attacked first by scavenging animals, because they are the easiest to
chew, i.e., the lips, tongue, ears, udders (teats), sex organs, and rectal area.
However, some of the cattle bore strange mutilations which could not be
accounted for in such a mundane manner. Ears were carefully removed,
tongues were cut out, udders and sex organs were gone, anuses sliced out, all
with apparent surgical skill. Also, in such cases, which were mostly black
Angus or black white-faced cattle, the carcasses were devoid of blood as if
drained with a needle. No blood could be found on the ground, nor footprints or
vehicular tracks. As one farmer put it, it was as if the bodies were mutilated
elsewhere and dropped to the ground from the air. (In fact, there had been
several cases reported of helicopters leaving the scene of cattle mutilations, but
identifying details were difficult to observe in the dark of night. Most often, in
such instances, the helicopters were heard but not seen.)
Eventually, law-enforcement personnel, working together with veterinarians,
uncovered the working of a bizarre Satanical cult group somewhat reminiscent
of the Charles Manson “family.”
The leader of this “family” operated in Minnesota for a while, then moved
abruptly to Texas when family members ran afoul of the law. The leaders were
apprehended and placed in custody.
Their general modus operandi was as follows: The group, which would
approach its intended victim at night, walked upon large pieces of pasteboard
which they picked up and carried with them; thus no tracks were left. The
victim was shot with a tranquilizer dart, immobilizing it (traces of nicotine
sulfate were found in the livers of some of the animals). Then a heart stimulant
was injected, an artery in the throat was punctured, and the blood was caught in
a plastic bag and carried from the scene in that manner. Organs to be used in the
Satanic rites were then surgically removed with a minimum of bleeding.
It seems likely that similar cult groups are responsible for other mutilated-
animal cases and perhaps some of these instances are even the work of
deranged individuals. But one of the least likely explanations is that UFOs were
involved.
For a time, a young man who claimed to be a lecturer for the University of
Minnesota was spreading the word that UFOs had shot some Minnesota cattle
and had “collapsed their blood structure with mercury.” An interview with this
man disclosed a preoccupation with achieving notoriety, and attempts at
technical discussion were patently naive. His credibility also suffered from the
fact that he claimed to be a “Sasquatch,” or “Bigfoot,” contactee (he had visited
in their homes). Needless to say, his touted evidence connecting UFOs with
dead cattle disappeared in the light of objective investigation.
Despite claims by such individuals and certain sensationalist elements of the
national media, no satisfactory evidence has ever emerged which links UFOs to
mutilated animals.
—CORAL & JIM LORENZEN
Anomalist, The In 1993, two freelance writers for Omni magazine, Patrick
Huyghe and Dennis Stacy, met at a Mutual UFO Network (MUFON)
conference in Richmond, Virginia, and lamented the then sorry state of UFO
and Fortean journalism. Since both had been thinking about starting a new
journal on anomalies, they decided to collaborate.
By the Summer of 1994, the first issue of The Anomalist appeared. The
resulting illustrated journal, in trade paperback format, features high quality
writing on a variety of topics, ranging from “alien writing” and ghosts, to
Bigfoot, crop circles, and issues of human invisibility. The twice yearly journal,
which explores the mysteries of science, history and nature, quickly garnered
rave reviews and spawned a complementary Web site of the same name at
www.anomalist.com.
In its first five years, The Anomalist has published a number of major UFO
stories, including “Project Blue Book’s Last Years,” an excerpt from the
unpublished memoirs of Col. Hector J. Quintanilla; “UFOs: For RAND Use
Only” by Karl Pflock; and Martin Kottmeyer’s award winning essay on “UFO
Flaps.”
The editing team of Huyghe and Stacy have much in common. Stacy was
editor of The MUFON UFO Journal and had published articles on UFOs in
such mainstream publications as Smithsonian Air & Space and New Scientist.
Huyghe had been editor of UFO Commentary, back in the late 1960s and early
1970s, and had published articles on UFOs in Science Digest and The New York
Times Sunday Magazine. Huyghe’s book, The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials,
appeared in 1996 and he has collaborated with Stacy on a companion volume
called The Field Guide to UFOs (Quill, 2000).
P.O. Box 577

Address:
Jefferson Valley, NY 10535 U.S.A.
E-mail: editors@anomalist.com
Web site: www.anomalist.com
—PATRICK HUYGHE
Anthropic Principle This idea is closely related to anthropomorphism or
anthropocentrism, which is seeing the universe in terms of ourselves. As the
ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras (ca. 490-420 B.C.) put it: “Man is the
measure of all things.” This myopic point of view has extended to the human
search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
As concisely stated by Frank Drake: “...the controversial ‘Anthropic
Principle’...holds that the universe was made exactly the way it is so we may
exist. Or, put another way, we exist only because the unverse is the way it is.”
This statement is basically a tautology (made true by its definition). However,
the extreme implication is “...that the universe is so finely tuned as to hold just
one intelligent species: us.” (Drake and Sobel, 1992)
The “weak” version of the anthropic principle merely points out that if
things had been different, we would not exist. For example, the laws of nature
and the myriad “coincidences” that have figured into human evolution seem to
have been amazingly well adapted to us (rather than the other way around). So
much so, that according to proponents of the “strong” version of the anthropic
principle, the laws of nature seem to have been specifically designed “...(don’t
ask how or by Whom) so that humans would eventually come to be. Almost all
of the other possible universes, they say, are inhospitable. In this way, the
ancient conceit that the Universe was made for us is resuscitated.” (Sagan,
1994)
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Drake, Frank, and Sobel, Dava. Is Anyone Out There? (Souvenir Press, 1992).
Sagan, Carl. Pale Blue Dot (Random House, 1994).
apocalyptic thought connected with UFOs and ETs The belief or

feeling that a violent catastrophe will befall humanity in the near future is more
formally termed “world-destruction fantasy” or “apocalyptic thought.” These
terms are used in a broad sense to include cataclysms of virtually any
magnitude in which great loss of life and suffering is implied.
Such beliefs are pervasive in the history of UFO culture, with examples
numbering in the hundreds. Their history extends back to the earliest puzzlings
of Kenneth Arnold and runs continuously to the latest horrors at the cutting
edge of abduction research. Contactees, abductees, fringe UFO buffs, and
respected UFO researchers alike have contributed to the doom-saying
sensibility.
The range of cataclysmic violence begins on the low end with modest
spectacles of cities destroyed in nuclear blasts (Cecil Michael, Sonora desert-F-
4-74) or a city dying from a nuclear storm or cloud (Cannon’s Carrie). The
scale runs through wars (John Hodges, Ted Owens, Brian Scott, Linda Taylor,
Jerry), the destruction of civilization (George Hunt Williamson, Buck Nelson,
Norman Harrison, Marshall Applewhite), the sinking of California (PLW,
Helen Hoag, Filiberto Cardenas, Mandelker’s Bob), the inundation of
continents (Robin McPherson), population reduced by 40 percent or 50 percent
or more (Andrijah Puharich’s Space Kids, Scott Mandelker), the cracking open
of the planet (Pedro Ramirez, Francie Steiger), the atmosphere being set on fire
(Linda Porter), the complete ignition of the planet (Ralph Lael, Arthur
Shuttlewood), the orbit shifted outwards (MN Pleiadean), planets pulled toward
the Sun (Dr. Malachi Z. York), destabilization of the solar system (Frank
Stranges, John Sands, A.N. Tasca), the blowing up of the solar system
(Necoma), destabilization of the galaxy (George Adamski), endangerment of
the universe (C.A.V., Jerry Gross) destruction of other universes (Janice), and
even beyond to a universal dissolution involving black holes that not even the
gods would be immune to (George Andrews.)
Concern over the “balance of the universe” is peculiarly common and begins
early with the Ouija board contact of George Hunt Williamson with Zo of
Neptune on August 17, 1952. Dorothy Martin, Sr. Helio Aguiar, Stuart
Whitman, and Arthur Shuttlewood echoed this concern. Carlos, one of John
Mack’s prophets, modernizes the wording by speaking of a tearing of the
cosmic fabric essential to the unity of the universe.
The mode of destruction varies across a wide and inconsistent repertoire of
creative options. Some say the world will end in fire (Stephen Pulaski, William
J. Herrmann, Arthur Shuttlewood, Dana Redfield, Linda Porter, Roxanne
Zeigler). Some say in ice (Elgar Brom’s Noel, Stan Seers).
Floods and tidal waves equally suffice (Dorothy Martin, Rolf Telano,
Barbara Hudson, Lynn Volpe, Peter). Continents rise or fall and Earth’s axis
will tilt for better than a dozen contactees. The Mitchell sisters and Helen Hoag
overtly credit the fact that this is a replay of the Atlantis myth. Arthur, one of
Mack’s group, warns a cosmic water balloon will flood the Earth, suffocating
everything. Inversely, the desertfication of the Brazilian rain forest will extend
everywhere according to Jerry in this same group.
Mona Stafford and Francis Swan see the end coming in the manner mapped
out by the Bible and Revelation. Orfeo Angelucci warned a fiery red comet of
doom might collide with Earth if we did not change our ways. Anthony Volpe
saw the Earth expanding like a balloon by 20 percent and then settling back.
There’s an electromagnetic catastrophe coming (Joe), or the end of oil (Paul
Bennett) or a plague of communicable AIDs (Scott), or extinction by sterility
(Betty Andreasson). Eduard Meier and Robert Short see problems connected
with the loss of the ionosphere.
Professor R.N. Hernandez casts his doomsday in a virtually unreadable
bafflegab that has something to do with a band of mineral solids encircling our
world and aliens trying to make us annihilate ourselves. Richard Miller said
aliens had a ring of ten million ships around our world trying to protect us from
the effects of a cloud of cosmic debris. Some quakes, tidal waves, and bad
weather caused by radiation effects on the Earth’s core could not be prevented.
Dino Kraspedon warned use of the hydrogen bomb would create unknown
elements that would upset the atmosphere in ways that would lead to quakes,
tidal waves, strange diseases, and maniacs in the streets. Dorothy Cannon’s
subject, Janice, fears the circumference of the Earth will fold into its center
causing an explosion that ripples to other galaxies and universes, because of
their atomic structure.
A nice number of these prophets were kind enough to set firm endpoints on
their prophecies thus allowing them to be easily tested and falsified by simply
letting time pass.
Phrases like “the end is coming soon” (Harry Joe Turner) and “Earth time is
desperately short” (Arthur Shuttlewood) are a recurrent refrain. The fact that
decades have passed since ten or so uttered them indicates either they are
wrong or use “soon” in an opaque fashion.
The record of error presented in the table calls for some sort of explanation.
Some will follow the lead of the Lorenzens who felt aliens were liars and
disseminated disinformation as part of an immense charade. It is a peculiar sort
of campaign however.
Starfarers should be more scientifically sophisticated than to bluff with
notions as dubious as pole-shifts.
Concerns that man could have tangible effects on the universe’s balance
sound pre-Copernican and a grandiose conceit of man’s powers. It is also odd
that they don’t stick to one scenario filtered through all their contacts to give
the lies more credibility and the letdown more bite.
Kenneth Ring’s Omega Project affirms the ubiquitous character of
apocalyptic thinking in UFO belief. His survey of a population of UFO
experiencers found fully 85 percent reported an increase in their concern for
planetary welfare after their experiences; 60 percent said it strongly increased.
This provides a nice backdrop to Jenny Randles’ finding that 28 percent of
bedroom-visitor contacts included imminent Earth catastrophe as a reason for
alien visitation, the most common of the motifs looked at.
Apocalyptic thought is hardly limited to the UFO subculture. One has only
to look at the history of Christianity, from the beliefs of Jesus that the world
would spectacularly end in his generation, to Revelation, to the latest end-time
cults, to realize the power of this belief.
Environmentalists have offered a smorgasbord of eco-catastrophes in recent
decades. New Age literature repeatedly foresees Earth changes, with the name
Edgar Cayce repeatedly invoked as an authority on these matters. Apocalypse
has been considered part of the basic plot of all science fiction. Stanislaw Lem
notes that every fan has a library of agonies in which writers have refined the
end of the world into something “as formally elegant as a well thought out
gambit” in chess. Anthropologists have encountered world-destruction fantasies
in farflung cultures and myriad forms such as to suggest it extends back
through aboriginal times. This hints at the involvement of a panhuman
psychological process.
Psychologists have developed some insights into this process. Fantasies
about the destruction of the world are a common feature of psychotic mental
universes. Freud was one of the earlier psychological thinkers to observe
world-catastrophe beliefs are not infrequent in the agitated stages of developing
paranoia. His favorite paranoid, the respected judge and doctor Daniel Paul
Schreber, held a conviction of the imminence of a great catastrophe either by
the withdrawal of the sun, by earthquake, or by pestilence through nervous
disorders. Though he initially placed this event 212 years in the future,
Schreber came to believe that period of time elapsed and he was the only real
man left alive. His doctors and attendants were “miracled up, cursorily
improvised men.” With the passage of time, he concluded that he himself had
passed away and was replaced. Despite the florid nature of these delusions, in
practical affairs Schreber was reasonable and well informed and never bothered
people with his private beliefs save to publish a book stating them.
Some lack this ability to wall off their delusions and slip into debilitating
madness. In The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, a young lady named
Renee describes in the early stages of her developing psychosis how she came
to believe the frozen wind from the North Pole wanted to crush the Earth. In
time she regarded it as an omen or sign, and confided to friends her fears that
planes were coming to bomb and annihilate them. She covered her conviction
in a jesting manner because of fears the idea was unfounded and not generally
held. Her sense of unreality deepened and she saw her madness as a country of
implacable blinding light. It was an immense space: limitless, flat, shadowless;
a mineral lunar country, cold as the wastes at the pole; a stretching emptiness
where all is congealed, crystallized, and unchanging. As time progressed, she
had waking fantasies of an electric machine that could blow up the world and
rob all men of their brains. This machine then took control of her life and made
her do destructive acts like putting her hand in a fire.
William J. Spring, who made a study of these world-destruction fantasies,
affirms eschatological fantasies are frequently met in schizophrenia, especially
in the early stages. Floods, wars, revolutions, earthquakes, plagues, and mass
poisonings form some of the more common motifs. The wiping out of the
human race is generally the anticipated outcome, but nations and mere cities
have served as stand-ins. Ernest Keen, a narrative psychologist, goes even
further than some observers and affirms he has “never known a paranoid who
did not have cataclysmic content” in his expectations about life.
The cause of this relationship has been the subject of some amount of
theorizing over the years. Some of Freud’s thoughts about the involvement of
the libido are no longer accepted. But there is one explanation that has
approval. It is nicely embodied in a parable told by the fictional yet prototypical
debunker Michael Webb:
“As a philosopher I have a special license to be peculiar; so now I’m going
to tell a fable. It’s short and soon over—so listen closely. One day a peasant
walking along a riverbank saw a fox struggling in the water. ‘Help, help’ the
fox cried. ‘The world is coming to an end.’ ‘You are mistaken my friend,’
replied the peasant, all I see is one small fox drowning.’ The moral is short and
easy to remember: when around deep water, watch your step.”
The fable is as astute as it is succinct. In more formal jargon, the end of the
world is a projection of a personal crisis. The ego is experiencing
disintegration, dissolution, loss of identity—self-destruction—and these
impulses are mirrored onto the external world. Of eleven patients presenting
world destruction fantasies, William Spring found that the idea of the person’s
own death played a prominent role in eight. Two fantasized about suicide, six
had delusions of dying or already being dead. The identification of self with the
cosmos was tragicomically illustrated by a patient of Spring who believed he
was himself God. He believed people feared that if he died, they would die.
One day, in a fit of anger, he pronounced retribution. “It’s the end of the
world!” Then, he threw himself onto the floor.
Kenneth Ring reinforced the general point in a study of near-death
experiences. Visions of world destruction formed a small but significant
fraction. They had a compelling vividness and similarity, but despite this soon
failed as factual forecasting. Carl Jung, the famed psychologist, had a similarly
vivid vision of the destruction of the world while suffering from arteriosclerosis
shortly before his death.
Stanislav Grof has observed that death and rebirth struggles in LSD
hallucinations are similarly accompanied by imagery of violent catastrophe:
earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, electrical storms, gigantic
comets and meteors, Armageddon, and so forth. They are constantly appearing
during certain stages of the tearing down of the ego; a tactic sometimes obliged
in therapy. Grof regards such imagery as the “source of schizophrenic
experiences and paranoid conditions.” (Grof, 1975)
The association of paranoia and schizophrenia with cataclysmic fantasy is
readily explicable within the framework of object relations theory. (Rinsley,
1981) When people fail to form an identity separate from parental figures, ego
defenses are poorly developed and tend to have a primitive, fearlaced logic.
The ego in such cases is easily susceptible to fragmentation and destruction in
the face of crises. (Frosch, 1983) In paranoia, the crisis typically involves
shame or humiliation. The persistence of apocalyptic thought thus reflects the
persistence of suffering in the world and the panhuman tendency to project
one’s mental state onto general reality.
The projective character of UFO apocalypticism is strongly hinted in the
expansive, totalistic nature of these fears. The imminent doom spreads to all
facets of external reality, much as paranoid conspiracies often spread to
international dimensions. The psychodynamic underpinnings of the world-
destruction fantasies in UFO culture are sometimes fairly evident when the
circumstances surrounding the prophecy are known to some degree of detail.
When Prophecy Fails by Leon Festinger is a psycho-sociological classic that
offers the most detailed account of a prophecy of doom on record. The
investigators ran across an item in the paper in which Dorothy Martin was
predicting a flood would destroy Chicago just before dawn on December 21,
1954. The cataclysm would spread, and the West Coast from Washington State
to Chile would be submerged. Festinger thought it would make an ideal case
study in the nature of proselytization in the wake of doomsday prediction
failing.
Festinger’s reporting is impressively comprehensive and he was able to pin
down the first explicit reference to the impending disaster as appearing in a
message from Sananda dated August 2, 1954. The authors don’t ask why it
appeared when it did, but their chronicle provides the answer. The day before,
on August 1st, Martin was joined by a group of people at an airfield to await the
landing of a spaceship that her contacts promised would come. It is simple
enough to infer the failure of this prediction in so public a manner was a source
of embarrassment. Some took it eventually as a sign she was a false prophet
and dropped out of the group surrounding her. (Festinger, et al., 1956)
Wilhelm Reich was officially declared to possess a paranoid nature by a
prison psychologist, and informally colleagues in Vienna psychoanalytic circles
regarded him so long before. His wife separated from him due to irrational
accusations of infidelity. In the waning years of his life he believed he was
involved in a war being waged from outer space with DOR, a negative form of
orgone energy he defined as Dead Life Energy. UFOs were an agent in the
deterioration of the environment manifesting in the destruction of rocks, trees,
forests, and the drying up of the atmosphere. Simultaneously with persecution
by the FDA, Reich declared seeing far and wide a DOR emergency—evidence
the War of the Universe was on. Later he predicted “the complete destruction of
the globe of mother Earth looms on the horizon of the future.” David Boadella,
speaking of Reich’s space-gun adventures in Arizona, regards it as obvious his
mind had “tumbled beyond retrieve.” (Reich, 1973)
Even before the events of Communion, Whitley Strieber was whispering
conspiracies—so much so that acquaintances tended to regard him as “the
quintessential paranoid.” His early life follows the recipe of creating a
paranoid: a trauma-filled childhood, a proud and ambitious family, a fall from
grace into financial ruin sparking social slights and ridicule, rejections, and a
withdrawal into himself. (Metzger, 1984; Winter, 1985)
These examples are merely illustrative of the personal dimension in the
process of apocalyptic thought and not a full accounting. Charles Strozier’s
study of the psychology of apocalyptic opinion among contemporary Christians
gives cause to note that end-time beliefs are sometimes adopted because of
group pressure, but modified and qualified by personality and experience.
(Strozier, 1994)
This likely applies in UFO culture when the fantasy conforms to more
popular fears like the common New Age expectation of a pole-shift. A similar
case would be Betty Andreasson’s aliens who forecast “mankind will become
sterile.” This echoes a familiar fear of environmentalists, one involving some
dubious premises according to an investigation by Michael Fumento.
(Fumento, 1999) It also looks like projection of her life. Andreasson had a
hysterectomy and abortion in 1964 because of cervical cancer. (Fowler, 1990)
Her sterility expands to fill the fate of the world.
One last note of possible interest is that these fantasies are rarely challenged
in a forceful way among believers. The failure of apocalyptic predictions may
be granted in a general way, but usually in a context advancing an alternative
pessimism.
The ideologies of optimism found elsewhere in the culture never germinate
there, never mind take root. Disbelievers, by contrast, tend to wax enthusiastic
over human progress and the march of science, embed human history in deep
time, and tend to see problems like overpopulation as soluble. (Kottmeyer,
2000) The infrequent instances of apocalyptic thought tend to be those
appearing popularly in general culture.
NOTE: For the sake of scholarly completeness, numerous names are mentioned
in the text with which the reader may be unfamiliar. However, the author stands
ready to direct the scholarly reader to his sources upon request. (Please include a
self-addressed, stamped envelope.) Contact information can be found under the
entry: KOTTMEYER, MARTIN S., in this encyclopedia.
References
Boadella, David. Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of his Work (Laurel, 1973).
Festinger, Leon, Henry W Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. When Prophecy Fails: A Social and
Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (Harper, 1956).
Fowler, Raymond. The Watchers (Bantam, 1990).
Frosch, John. The Psychotic Process (International University Press, 1983).
Fumento, Michael. “Hormonally Challenged,” American Spectator (October, 1999).
Grof, Stanislaw. Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (Viking, 1975).
Keel, John. The Mothman Prophecies (Signet/NAL, 1975).
Keen, Ernest. “Paranoia and Cataclysmic Narratives,” in Sarbin, Theodore J., ed. Narrative Psychology:
The Storied Nature of Human Conduct (Praeger, 1986).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Debunkers of Doom,” The Anomalist (2000).
La Barre, Weston. The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion (Delta, 1972).
Lem, Stanislaw. Microworlds (Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovick, 1984).
Metzger, Linda, ed. Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 12 (Gale Research, 1984).
Randles, Jenny. UFO Reality (Robert Hale, 1983).
Reich, Wilhelm. Contact with Space: Orop Desert Ea 1954-55 (Core Pilot, 1957).
Ring, Kenneth. “Precognitive and Prophetic Visions in Near Death Experiences,” Anabiosis: The Journal
of Near-Death Studies (1982).
________. “Prophetic Visions in 1988: A Critical Reappraisal,” The Journal of Near-Death Studies (Fall
1988).
________. The Omega Project (William Morrow, 1992).
Rinsley, Donald B. Borderline and Self Disorders: A Developmental and Object Relations Perspective
(Jason Aronson, 1981).
Sechehaye, Marguerite. Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (Signet/NAL, 1968).
Spring, William J. “Observations on World Destruction Fantasies,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1939).
Strachey, James, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
12: The Case of Schreber (The Hogarth Press, 1963).
Strieber, Whitley. Communion: A True Story (William Morrow/Beech Tree, 1987).
________. Transformation (William Morrow/Beech Tree, 1988).
Strozier, Charles. Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Beacon, 1994).
Winter, Douglas. Faces of Fear (Berkeley, 1985).
Woodward, W. E. Bunk (Harper, 1923).
APRO See AERIAL PHENOMENA RESEARCH ORGANIZATION.

archetypes, UFO-ET phenomena as Psychologist Carl G. Jung was the
first to term UFO sightings and contacts with them as “archetypal” phenomena
in his 1959 book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.
Jung was quick to point out that the word “myth” did not imply something that
did not happen. All myths, according to Jung, have a basis in reality; however,
myths are embellishments of truth.
Jung believed that UFOs had both a psychic (archetypal) and a physical
component. The spectacular, physical appearance of an unknown phenomenon
(like brilliant manifestations in the sky) stimulated powerful unconscious
processes in observers. These unconscious processes were released into the
conscious minds of the observers causing them to give meaning to what they
had observed. The meaning ascribed to UFO sightings come from the
observers’ cultural and personal expectations.
For example, UFO reports beginning in the modern era (1949) were often
interpreted as a military threat or a possible “alien” invasion. This was
consistent with societal fears caused by the Cold War developing immediately
after World War II and the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons. Some people
also saw the emerging UFO phenomenon as representing the coming of a
savior. Many people saw a world gone mad and had fervent hopes for an
unearthly salvation from the madness. The contactee reports in the 1950s
affirmed these expectations.
Basel Broadsheet of 1566
Jung interpreted the UFO phenomenon as a meaningful coincidence—or

synchronicity—between a physical occurrence coinciding with an expectant
mental state. Many people expected—and feared—uncontrollable disruption in
all life. At the same time—and probably unrelated to the ongoing events in
humanity—an unknown phenomenon (UFOs) manifested in the skies around
the world. This unknown provided people with a screen upon which they could
project their unconscious expectations and a “visionary rumor” quickly
developed. Jung’ famous statement, “something is seen, but one doesn’t know
what,” was his way of describing how this process begins.
When the unknown event is observed, people immediately project meaning
to it and report it to others. As more and more people hear about the reports,
this “rumor” —driven by something actually seen but not understood—is
perpetuated and strengthened. In this complicated process, archetypal forces are
released and provoke a powerful influence on society.
Jung took care to show that a long-term historical record existed showing
that spectacular (and unknown) manifestations in the sky had occurred
regularly throughout history. He cited Biblical accounts and reproduced the
Nuremberg Broadsheet from 1561 and the Basel Broadsheet from 1566 as
evidence.
Broadsheets served as the newspapers of that time. The unknown aerial
phenomena observed by thousands in Germany during this period were widely
reported and generally interpreted as a heavenly battle that was occurring in
conjunction with the many religious wars going on in Germany. The present
writer has uncovered at least fifty additional broadsheets showing similar
phenomena.
Nuremberg Broadsheet of 1561
Jung’s thought can be incomprehensible to many people, in part, because it

is necessary to be deeply acquainted with his other writings where he explains
his terminology in greater detail. Few people have the necessary background or
motivation to delve that deeply into his writing and have simply read or
skimmed his 1959 book. Many of the examples Jung used to show how
archetypes effect humanity come from consistencies in fairy tales, angelic
visitations, and even in art. So, the average person envisions an archetype
merely as a symbol. Most UFO writers have therefore interpreted Jung’s
depiction of UFOs as a visionary rumor to mean that the phenomenon is not
real in a physical sense—it is a mental process. However, that is not the case.
Jung termed the actual UFO manifestations as archetypal in nature and quite
real. (“Something is seen, but one doesn’t know what.”) In his vast writings,
Jung defined archetypes as “psychoid factors consisting of pure energy.” Under
the right conditions, these psychoid factors—archetypes—can manifest into
physical reality. Jung also related that the archetypes actually exist on the
“invisible, ultraviolet end of the light spectrum.” In The Archetype Experience
(Little, 1984) it was explained that the term “psychoid” describes a process that
bridges the gap between psychological reality and objective reality—exactly as
Jung described it. That is, archetypes are living energy forms (as described by
Jung) that can move into the visible portion of the electromagnetic energy
spectrum. John Keel’s (1970) classic book, UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse and
Grand Illusions (Little, 1994) make similar proposals.
Perhaps the most misunderstood and ignored aspect of Jung’s archetypal
theory of UFO phenomena was his idea that UFO-like flaps occur at regular,
predictable times in a great, cosmic cycle. In the preface to his 1959 book, Jung
states that, “reflections such as these are ... exceedingly unpopular...” What he
proposed in his preface was that spectacular manifestations occur in the sky
roughly every 2,150 years. Each 2,150-year cycle was a transition period
between the so-called Platonic Months in the well-known 26,000-year
precession of the equinoxes. The Age of Pisces, beginning just before the birth
of Christ, was heralded by archetypal manifestations (angels, stars, etc.), and
the Age of Aquarius is being heralded by modern UFO sightings. As each age
changed, the religious focus of the world changed with it. Jung wrote that the
transition period could last for a considerable time period, but that almost no
one would comprehend this idea or accept it—a prediction that has proven true
up to this point.
—GREGORY L. LITTLE
References
Jung, C. G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Routledge & Kegan
Paul/Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1959; Signet/NAL, 1969; Princeton University Press, 1978).
________. Mandala Symbolism (Princeton University Press, 1959, 1972).
________. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Princeton University Press, 1959, 1969).
________. On the Nature of the Psyche (Princeton University Press, 1960, 1969).
________. Answer to Job (Princeton University Press, 1960).
________. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Princeton University Press, 1966).
________. The Undiscovered Self (Princeton University Press, 1990).
Keel, John. UFOs:Operation Trojan Horse (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
Little, Gregory L. The Archetype Experience (Rainbow Books, 1984).
________. Grand Illusions (White Buffalo Books, 1994).
Are We Alone? (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981). Two University of Virginia

science professors, Robert Rood and James Trefil, write the first science book
proposing that we humans may be alone in our galaxy because a series of
“bottlenecks” make the evolution of life rare if not impossible elsewhere. The
first extraterrestrials we meet in space will be our own grandchildren who have
migrated from Earth.
Are We Alone? (Basic Books, 1995). Paul Davies, an Australian Professor of

Natural Philosophy, thinks the extraterrestrial civilizations we eventually meet
will be so far advanced they will appear as gods to us. He conjectures that what
we know as consciousness is a “fundamental emergent property” and natural
consequence of the laws of physics, meaning “the emergence of consciousness
in the universe is more or less guaranteed.”
Area 51 Also known as “Dreamland,” “Groom Lake,” or simply “the Ranch,”

this now semi-secret U.S. government test facility has become in the minds of
many the UFO capital of the world. The six-by-ten-mile dry lake bed is located
approximately 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada, as part of the Nellis
Test Range.
Popularly known as “Area 51” the site has a long history of official denial
and controversy, which has only intensified outside interest in it. During a 1995
hearing on an environmental pollution suit at the base, then-Secretary of the Air
Force Sheila Widnall refused to reveal even the official name of the facility,
claiming national security concerns.
Area 51 reportedly began life in the early 1950s, under the unofficial
designation “McGinley’s Farm,” to serve as a test site for the U-2 spyplane.
Since then, the facility has allegedly served as a test range for many of
America’s “black projects,” such as the SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance
airplane, the F-117 stealth fighter, and other stillundisclosed aerospace vehicles
and systems; possibly including the mysterious hypersonic “Aurora,” as well as
laser-assisted orbital launching systems and particle beam weapons.
In 1989, a self-described “physicist” by the name of Robert Lazar claimed in
a Las Vegas TV interview to have observed and worked with “flying saucers”
under test at the neighboring S-4 location (also known as Papoose Dry Lake
Bed), while he was employed there as a contractor. Lazar’s allegations that the
government has recovered, “reverse-engineered,” and flight-tested alien saucer-
craft are completely unsubstantiated, and his falsified educational and
employment histories have been exposed by investigators. Nonetheless, Lazar’s
claims have brought lasting worldwide attention to the base and himself, which
of course is the point. If any of Lazar’s claims of secret technology were true,
he would be serving a long prison term for violation of his so-called “Majestic”
security clearance.
Perhaps one should ask which is more likely: that Lazar can freely reveal to
the world his super-secret assignment (for which he was especially chosen) of
backengineering the propulsion systems of captured UFOs, or that this elusive
fellow who drives a red Corvette sporting a license plate that reads “MJ-12,”
and whose claimed credentials are mostly nonexistent, might have something
of a Walter Mitty complex?
Because the Groom Lake facility is in a known, accessible location and
because unusual aircraft and unidentified aerial phenomena are sometimes
visible from nearby, it has become a magnet for many who wish to observe
“UFO events.”
The nearby town of Rachel, Nevada, boasts a “Little A’Le’Inn” and a small
but continuous stream of tourists looking for UFOs. The state of Nevada has
even designated the local road, State Highway 375, as ”The Extraterrestrial
Highway.” A cottage industry of Area 51 experts and alleged witnesses, similar
to that of the Roswell, New Mexico, incident, seems to be a permanent part of
UFO lore.
Russian satellite photo of runways at Area 51
The U. S. Air Force has resisted allowing this once-secret installation to be

scrutinized close-up by uncleared people with no need-to-know. In response to
the unwanted worldwide publicity, the government recently expanded the 60-
square-mile property to include nearby hills, in an effort to deny would-be
observers any high ground from which to photograph tests in Area 51. The
government also employs contracted security guards to prevent unauthorized
entry to the posted area, and prominent signs warn intruders away with the
statement: “deadly force is authorized.”
Despite these government attempts, determined UFO buffs have recorded
intriguing telescopic videos that show bright lights hovering and zipping about
Groom Lake in maneuvers that seem impossible for conventional aircraft. It has
been suggested that these pictures may indicate tests of VTOL (vertical takeoff
and landing) craft, laser-assisted launch systems, particle-beam weapons, or
other developmental projects that combine these or other technologies.
Not surprisingly, the government has also resisted legal efforts by citizens to
disclose Area 51’s activities. A lawsuit concerning alleged pollution injuries in
Area 51 brought the following response on September 20, 1999: In Presidential
Determination 99-37, President Clinton said, in part, “I find that it is in the
paramount interest of the United States to exempt the United States Air Force’s
operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada, from any applicable requirement
for the disclosure to unauthorized persons of classified information concerning
that operating location.”
A search of the literature on the World Wide Web provides many speculative
articles on the possible uses and significance of Area 51, as well as detailed
satellite photographs of the base.
—ARLAN K. ANDREWS
Arnold sighting The “modern age” of “flying saucers” began with the sighting
by Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947. Arnold, a civilian pilot, was flying over
the Cascade mountains in western Washington State, when he reported seeing
nine shiny objects in a chain-like formation flying at an estimated speed of
1,600 miles per hour.
Kenneth Arnold and his plane
Arnold was thirty-two years old at the time, and the owner of a fire-control
equipment company based in Boise, Idaho. He took off from the Chehalis,
Washington, airport at 2 P.M. flying his own single-engine plane. He was
searching for a lost Marine C-46 transport; a $5,000 reward had been offered
for its location.
After about one hour aloft, Arnold trimmed out his aircraft and simply
observed the terrain. He described the sky as clear and the air smooth.
Upon entering the vicinity of Mount Rainier, a sudden brilliant flash lit up
the surfaces of his plane. Startled, he began scanning the sky to locate the
source. The only other aircraft in sight was a lone DC-4 far to his left and rear,
too far away to have been the source of the flash. The flash occurred again, and
this time he caught the direction from which it came. To his left and to the north
he saw nine brightly illuminated objects flying in a chain-like formation from
north to south.
A recreation of the scene according to Arnold’s description (Drawing by Susan Swiatek)
Arnold was no stranger to this territory, as he had flown in the area many
times before. This was one aspect of the sighting that made many people take it
seriously. Not only was he a “solid citizen” and a respected businessman, but an
experienced mountain pilot as well; and he saw something that was truly
unusual to him.
The objects appeared to come from the vicinity of Mount Baker and were
staying close to the mountaintops, swerving in and out of the highest peaks.
Noticing this, Arnold was able to calculate their speed. The distance between
Mount Rainier and Mount Adams was forty-seven miles and the “objects”
crossed this distance in one minute and forty-two seconds. This translates into
1,656.71 miles per hour, nearly three times as fast as the capability of any
aircraft at that time. (The top speed of the F-80 “Shooting Star” was 605 mph,
and the top speed of the F-84 “Thunderjet” and F-84F “Thunderstreak” was
620 mph.)
The objects, furthermore, had a strange appearance, which Arnold said he
could observe plainly (though this point is questionable, since he was observing
from an estimated distance of twenty-three miles); they had wings, he said, but
no tails. One was almost crescent-shaped, with a small dome midway between
the wingtips; the others were “flat like a pie pan and so shiny they reflected the
sun in a mirror.” Their motion was also weird: “like speedboats on rough
water” or, to use Arnold’s most famous phrase, “they flew like a saucer would
if you skipped it across the water.” The duration of the sighting was two to
three minutes.
A tracing of Arnold’s original sketch for the U.S. Air Force
After giving his original account to newsmen at Pendleton, Oregon, airport,

the story soon broke worldwide, over the radio and via the press. The news
reporter who is generally credited with coining the term “flying saucer” is
William C. Bequette, who at the time worked in the newsroom of the Pendleton
East Oregonian. (See the POSTSCRIPT to this entry for more information on
this.)
Arnold originally described the objects for the Air Force as being nearly
round but slightly longer than wide. But, in the book he wrote with Ray Palmer
there appears a drawing of a quite different shape, looking almost like a
crescent moon with a small, speckled circle located midway between the
wingtips.
Photo of a model of one of the objects Arnold reportedly saw
For fourteen years, Arnold had refrained from endorsing any special theory
to account for his sighting. He steadfastly rejected any possibility of a mirage
or illusion of any sort, insisting that he saw something that was flying through
the air, just as he was, at 9,500 feet. But, what is not widely known is that
Arnold is a “repeater,” i.e., he claims to have seen several more UFOs since his
famous sighting in 1947. In Flying Saucers magazine of November 1962
(edited and published by the late Ray Palmer), Arnold took a position which
must have shocked many who relied upon his original sighting as corroborative
evidence for the extraterrestrial-spaceship theory to account for UFOs. He
wrote:
After some fourteen years of extensive research, it is my conclusion that the

so-called unidentified flying objects that have seen in our atmosphere are
not space ships from another planet at all, but are groups and masses of
living organisms that are as much a part of our atmosphere and space as the
life we find in the depths of our oceans. The only major difference in the
space and atmospheric organisms are that they have the natural ability to
change their densities at will.
And, in a special issue of Look magazine devoted to flying saucers, Arnold was
quoted as saying: “The impression I have held after observing these strange
objects a second time was that they were something alive rather than machines
—a living organism of some type that apparently has the ability to change its
density similar to fish that are found in our oceans without losing their apparent
identity.”
After reviewing such bizarre testimony, perhaps there is little wonder why
the U.S. Air Force could not explain what Arnold actually saw on 24 June
1947. As in all cases of alleged UFO sightings, no matter who investigates the
case, the investigator is severely limited by the testimony of the witness.
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek (who served as the scientific consultant to the U.S.
Air Force’s Projects Sign and Blue Book from 1948 to 1969) first thought that
Arnold saw a fleet of jet aircraft and that the estimated distance between the
objects and the witness, was wrong.
Debunkers have paraded a long list of explanations over the following half-
century including clouds, mirages, balloons, earth-lights, hallucinations, and
hoaxes.
More recently, the theory has been offered by James Easton—and endorsed
by Martin Kottmeyer—that what Arnold actually saw was a flock of American
White Pelicans, which were much closer to Arnold than he realized. The
behavior and appearance of the “objects” as described by Arnold seem to be
more consistent with this answer than anything else.
(1) Appearance
(wings, but no tails);
(2) Formation (“very similar to a formation of geese”);
(3) Flight characteristics (“they fluttered and sailed, tipping their wings
alternately and emitting those very bright blue-white flashes from their
surfaces”).
Arnold also stated that he “...did not get the impression that these flashes
were emitted by them, but rather that it was the sun’s reflection from the
extremely highly polished surface of their wings.”
But, the Arnold sighting was an exciting story in 1947, and the one that
triggered public interest and official U.S. Air Force involvement in the UFO
controversy. It is also a sighting that is technically unexplained.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Arnold, Kenneth, and Palmer, Ray. The Coming of the Saucers (privately published, 1952).
Arnold, Kenneth. Flying Saucers (November 1962).
“Flying Saucers,” a Look magazine special by the editors of United Press International and Cowles
Communications (1967).
Story, Ronald D. UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow, 1981).
POSTSCRIPT: In early 1992, I was working as a technical editor on a temporary
contract assignment at the Hanford nuclear site in southeastern Washington
State, about 70 miles north of Pendleton, Oregon. One Sunday, as I flipped
through the Tri-City Herald, I noticed an editorial by retired editor William C.
Bequette. I thought the name sounded familiar, and a small photo of the guest
editor showed him to be just about the right age.
It then dawned on me who this was. I proceeded to look up his number in
the local telephone directory (for Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco) and decided
to give him a call. When Mr. Bequette answered the phone, I asked whether he
was the newsman who had interviewed Kenneth Arnold for the East
Oregonian, in 1947, and coined the term “flying saucer.” He said he was.
I just had to ask a few questions for historical interest—and to satisfy my
own curiosity—and Mr. Bequette kindly obliged me with a very pleasant 30-
minute telephone conversation. I first wanted to know the story behind the term
“flying saucer” itself. There has always been a controversy about the Arnold
case concerning whether the term “saucer” referred to the object’s motion or
shape. Even in Arnold’s book, The Coming of the Saucers, co-authored with
Ray Palmer in 1951, the term “saucer” was used only to describe the objects’
motion. The famous quote is: “...they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it
across the water.” The shape is depicted variously as a crescent or flying wing,
a pie pan, and a giant washer with a hole in the middle. But Bequette told me
that Arnold used the term to describe the objects’ shape as well as its motion.
He said that Arnold definitely described the objects as “saucer-shaped,” and
that is how the term “flying saucer” was born.
I recently read somewhere that Bequette has said otherwise, but I can only
repeat what he confirmed to me: that he was indeed the man who coined the
term “flying saucer,” which was based on Arnold’s description of both the
objects’ appearance and motion. If the reporters and witnesses change and/or
confuse their stories—which often happens in UFOlogy—what can you say?
—RONALD D. STORY
Ashtar Command A title used to describe an intergalactic, multidimensional

federation of benevolent extraterrestrials, under the supreme jurisdiction of a
being named “Ashtar” or “Ashtar Sheran,” said to be a higher dimensional ET
ship commander. The phenomenon of physical and/or telepathic contact with
Ashtar seems to have begun with the 1950s contactees, and continues globally
to the present day.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
astrogenesis This term was coined by the editor of this encyclopedia (Ronald
Story) to designate the particular theory that Biblical references to the “Elohim”
or extraterrestrial “gods” having created human beings closely parallel the
modern conception of god-like beings coming here from outer space.
Even in our enlightened age (at the dawn of the 21st Century) the most
intelligent species on this planet (supposedly Homo sapiens) is split on the
question of its origins. About 50 percent believe in the received doctrine of
official science: Darwin’s theory of evolution as modified by the modern
scientific community. According to this view, the magic ingredient to
evolutionary development is time. Agreeing with the Bible in that man (or
Adam) was derived from the dust of the Earth—after possible seeding from the
heavens—most scientists think that given sufficient time, atoms just naturally
evolve into molecules, and molecules eventually evolve into thinking
anthropoids. All of this occurs through a process of random mutation, natural
selection, and survival of the fittest, they say. Admittedly, this is a bit
oversimplified; but the key point is that for most self-respecting scientific
types, no intelligent intervention is required.
Another view, held by the other half of the world’s population, is that the
world and its inhabitants were not the result of accidental forces—but that some
form of intelligence was required. Those who favor this idea are divided into
various factions, all of which represent some form of special creation.
The religious fundamentalists say that God is the Creator. However, their
version of God, the Father, has an uncanny resemblance to our own fathers or at
least the common childhood concept. Freud’s theory was that God is indeed the
father—writ large—as derived from our own exaggerated concept conceived in
infancy.
Another version of special creation, and one that is more compatible with
modern science than the views of the religious fundamentalists is the space-god
theory—or what I prefer to call “astrogenesis.” This view is, in effect, a space-
age Genesis: a creation story featuring mankind as the product of a cosmic
experiment being carried out not by the traditional Judeo-Christian God, but by
advanced extraterrestrials who, because of attributes acquired during their own
long evolution, might themselves be defined as gods.
The popularity of this view in recent times is clearly attributable to author
Erich von Däniken, who resurrected the concept (in tandem with the release of
Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) three decades
ago, and has since sold more than 50 million books on the subject.
While many do not accept all his examples of alleged extraterrestrial
evidence, there seems to be growing support for the underlying thesis that
extraterrestrial intervention holds the key to our origin and purpose on this
planet.
What is the nature of the evidence for astrogenesis? There are two major
categories: (1) artifacts and (2) contact myths. The artifacts usually take the
form of impressive monuments—such as the Egyptian pyramids and other
gigantic stone structures—which seemingly were beyond the capabilities of
mere humans to create. Thus, it is argued that advanced extraterrestrial science
must have been required. The contact myths, found worldwide, share an
intriguing consistency in their tales of super-beings coming from the sky to
create mankind and instruct him in how to live.
For some, the theory of astrogenesis brings science and religion closer
together. For others, it represents a travesty on both. This writer believes that
we should strive to be as objective and open-minded as possible to allow for
new discoveries. Keeping an open mind does not mean ignoring the facts,
however, as one can see by reading my previous books on this subject: The
Space-Gods Revealed (1976) and Guardians of the Universe? (1980). Both
studies dealt extensively with the question of alleged extraterrestrial science
and found none.
What I found was that if you take each of the examples of “alien
technology” (as alleged by von Däniken, et al.) and subject them to the normal
rules of evidence, they fall apart. For one thing, the level of technology
required for the construction of the various artifacts and monuments in question
never exceeds the capabilities of Earthmen working on their own in the context
of their own cultures. The archaeological “wonders” that are alleged to prove,
or at least “indicate,” ancient astronauts comprise a collection of interesting
finds, superficially described and taken out of context. In most cases, when
looking more deeply into the matter—as opposed to playing the “it looks
like...” game—one finds the omission of highly relevant, key information that
if known casts an entirely different light on the subject at hand. These “sins of
omission” are unfortunately typical of all the leading proponents of ancient
astronauts.
So, leaving aside the issue of physical evidence at this time, let us consider
the world’s most popular contact myth: the Holy Bible. The implications are
enormous. If indeed the Bible does refer to extraterrestrials (which it does, in
one sense or another), it tells their purpose and ours. It tells us where we came
from, our mission on Earth, and what we can expect in the future—depending
on whether or not we follow the teachings of the Bible. If we obey the Ten
Commandments (and the other universal laws taught in the Bible) and have
faith that Jesus Christ is our savior, we are told that we will not only be saved,
but that we can achieve immortality like the gods.
In essence, the Bible is a creation story and operating manual for life on
planet Earth. Whether it is interpreted supernaturally or scientifically, one
cannot escape its central message—that we are not alone. Nor can anyone deny
that here we are dealing with an account of superior extraterrestrial forces
coming down out of the heavens to intervene in the lives of mortal human
beings. This is literally what the Bible says.
These gods (the Elohim) first create man in their image, and then attempt to
impart ultimate principles (or Cosmic Laws) for him to live by. What is
promised, if we choose to obey these laws, is nothing less than everlasting life.
Put simply, we are given vital instructions on how to achieve immortality—
individually and as a species. These laws, such as the Ten Commandments and
the lessons of Jesus, constitute the “good” or benevolent God (or gods) versus
the “evil” forces (or dark side) of the universe. These laws, known as the “word
of God,” tell us how to live in harmony with nature and find our rightful place
in a universe of immortal souls. Whatever your interpretation, God and his
angels (including the fallen angels) are de facto extraterrestrials and represent
ultimate authority, any way you look at it. That is the key point.
An important question often asked by skeptics is: “If extraterrestrials exist,
why is there no open contact?” One answer to this question is that if the Bible
is to be taken literally, then we have had open contact. According to both the
Old and New Testaments, extraterrestrial forces representing the classic
struggle of good versus evil (gods and demons) have intervened in the creation
and development of humankind and may be planning a return visit as indicated
in the Book of Revelation.
We know what happened last time, when Jesus tried to convert the masses to
follow the “word of God.” According to the prophecies of Revelation, we
should clearly expect something different next time. For one thing—no more
Mr. Nice Guy!
This writer’s position is that if we are to take the Bible literally, then
logically speaking, the concept of technologically superior beings from other
worlds in space is at least as reasonable as the traditional supernatural
interpretation. In addition, we have the moral and religious teachings kept in
tact as well, if we view the Biblical messages as the philosophy of advanced
civilizations—representing good and evil factions—each vying for control.
—RONALD D. STORY
astronauts, UFO sightings by The glamour and drama of manned space

flights have been transferred to the UFO field via a highly publicized group of
“UFO sightings” and photographs allegedly made by American and Russian
space pilots. Hardly a UFO book or movie fails to mention that “astronauts
have seen UFOs too.”
However, careful examination of each and every one of these stories can
produce quite reasonable explanations, in terms of visual phenomena associated
with space flights. On a visit to NASA’s Johnson Manned Spacecraft Center in
Houston in July 1976, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, of the Center for UFO Studies,
concluded that none of the authentic cases (as opposed to the majority of
reports, which are fictitious) really had anything to do with the “real UFO
phenomenon.”
UFO skeptics, while pleased that Hynek had dismissed all “astronaut UFO
reports” as unreliable, have insisted that this body of stories has quite a lot to do
with the major problems besetting the UFO community. How, they ask, can a
body of stories so patently false and unreliable obtain such seeming
authenticity simply by being passed back and forth among researchers without
ever being seriously investigated? Is this a characteristic of UFO stories in
general, and if so, the skeptics ask, can a study of how the “astronaut UFO”
myth began and flourished help us to understand better the UFO phenomenon
in general?
Hynek’s disavowal of the stories came after publication of his book, The
Edge of Reality (1975), which carried a long list of astronaut-sighting reports.
Hynek told colleagues that the inclusion of the list (compiled by UFOlogist
George Fawcett) in the book was Jacques Vallée’s idea, not his, but that even
so, he just wanted to generate interest and discussion. He insisted that inclusion
of the list was not a judgment on his belief in its credibility and that readers had
no right to assume that the data had actually been verified just because it was
included. Fawcett, on the other hand, claims that he just assembled the list from
all available sources and assumed that somebody else would check the accounts
before publication. “Maybe one percent of the stories are true UFOs,” Fawcett
suggested in 1978.
Here is the complete “Fawcett List” quoted from The Edge of Reality but,
this time, including likely explanations (in italics) of the reports:
(1) “February 20, 1962—John Glenn, piloting his Mercury capsule, saw
three objects follow him and then overtake him at varying speeds.” Glenn also
said that these “snowflakes” were small, and seemed to be coming from the
rear end of his capsule. Astronauts on later flights also observed them and were
able to create “snowstorms” by banging on the walls of their capsules.
(2) “May 24, 1962—Mercury VII: Scott Carpenter reported photographing
fireflylike objects with a hand camera and that he had what looked like a good
shot of a saucer.” Carpenter did see “fireflies,” as well as a balloon ejected
from his capsule. The claim that he reported photographing a “saucer” is
counterfeit. His photo, taking into account the glare of sunlight, smeared
window, and gross enlargement of the small image, has been widely published
as a “saucer” but is in fact the tracking balloon.
(3) “May 30, 1962—XI5 Pilot Joe Walton photographed five disc-like
objects.” This story appears to be a complete fabrication. The real pilot’s name
was Joe Walker, who supports no such claim
(4) “July 17, 1962—X15 Pilot Robert White photographed objects about
thirty feet away from his craft while about fifty-eight miles up.” Right, and he
also reported that the objects were small—“about the size of a piece of paper.”
They were probably flakes of ice off the supercold fuel tanks.
(5) “May 16, 1963—Mercury IX: Gordon Cooper reported a greenish UFO
with a red tail during his fifteenth orbit. He also reported other mysterious
sightings over South America and Australia. The object he sighted over Perth,
Australia, was caught on screens by ground tracking stations.” Cooper has
recently denounced all stories of UFOs on his space flights as fabrications—
this one included The multicolor UFO is probably based on a misquotation of
Cooper’s postflight report on a sighting of the Aurora Australis.
(6) “October 3, 1963—Mercury VIII: Walter Schirra reported large glowing
masses over the Indian Ocean.” Indeed he did, referring to lightning-lit cloud
masses over the nighttime ocean a hundred miles below.
(7) “March 8, 1964—Voskhod 2: Russian cosmonauts reported an
unidentified object just as they entered the Earth’s atmosphere.” Several hours
before returning to Earth the cosmonauts spotted a cylindershaped object they
assumed (probably correctly) was just another man-made satellite. Such
sightings were becoming more and more frequent as the number of manned
flights and unmanned satellites rose.
(8) “June 3, 1964—Gemini IV: Jim McDivitt reported he photographed
several strange objects, including a cylindrical object with arms sticking out
and an eggshaped UFO with some sort of exhaust.” This is the most famous
“astronaut-UFO” case and it has been embellished and distorted in dozens of
publications. McDivitt saw a “beer can-shaped” object, which he took to be
another man-made satellite (some observers believe it was his own booster
rocket), and tried to take a few photos which did not turn out. A still from the
movie camera was mistakenly released without the astronaut’s review, showing
what turned out to be a light reflection off his copilot’s window, according to
McDivitt. Some UFO buffs became excited about this photo and acclaimed it as
one of the best UFO photos ever taken, showing (they claim) a glowing object
with a plasma tail. But, McDivitt denies he saw anything like that in space.
(9) “October 12, 1964—Voskhod 1: Three Russian cosmonauts reported
they were surrounded by a formation of swiftly moving disc-shaped objects.”
This story appears to be a complete fabrication but certain UFO believers cling
to it while challenging skeptics to approve it did NOT happen.”
(10) “December 4, 1965—Gemini VIII: Frank Borman and Jim Lovell
photographed twin oval-shaped UFOs with glowing undersides.” This famous
photograph is a blatant forgery (by sensationalist elements of the media), in
which light reflections off the nose of the spacecraft were later made to look
like UFOs, by airbrushing away the vehicle structure around them
(11) “July 18, 1966—Gemini X: John Young and Mike Collins saw a large,
cylindrical object accompanied by two smaller, bright objects, which Young
photographed. NASA failed to pick them up on screens.” The astronauts
reported two bright fragments near their spacecraft soon after launch,
presumably pieces of the booster or of some other satellite. No photos were
taken. They were out of range of NASA radar at this point anyway.
(12) “September 12, 1966—Gemini XI: Richard Gordon and Charles
Conrad reported a yellow-orange UFO about six miles from them. It dropped
down in front of them and then disappeared when they tried to photograph it.”
The astronauts described the close passage of another space satellite, identified
by NORAD as the Russian Proton-3 satellite (an identification later disproved
by Bruce Maccabee). The men got three fuzzy photos which, much blown up,
have been widely published. But their eyesight accounts describe a solid
satellite-looking object on ballistic nonmaneuvering path.
(13) “November 11, 1966—Gemini XIII: Jim Lovell and Edwin Aldrin saw
four UFOs linked in a row. Both spacemen said the objects were not stars.”
Indeed they were not, since the astronauts were talking about four bags of trash
they had thrown overboard an hour earlier!
(14) “December 21, 1968—Apollo VIII: Frank Borman and Jim Lovell
reported a “bogie”—an unidentified object—ten miles up.” Actually, Borman
referred to a “bogie” on his first space flight three years before, describing
some pieces of debris associated with his spacecraft’s separation from the
booster rocket. The reference to Apollo VIII is careless, possibly even fictitious.
(15) “July 16, 1969—Apollo XI: This was a mission on which a UFO
reportedly chased the spacecraft.” “Reportedly,” indeed, but not very accurate.
Actually, several UFO stories have attached themselves barnacle-like to man’s
first moon landing. A photo of an insulation fragment taken soon after third-
stage separation has been widely published as a “UFO.” The astronauts
watched their booster through a telescope on the way to the moon. A series of
“UFO photos” allegedly taken by astronaut Aldrin in lunar orbit are actually
forgeries by a Japanese UFO magazine. An alleged “astronaut radio
conversation” describing a UFO ambush is a hoax.
(16) “November 14, 1969—Apollo XII: Astronauts Pete Conrad, Alan Bean,
and Dick Gordon said a UFO accompanied them to within 132,000 miles of the
moon, preceding them all the way.” They never said that. They were joking with
the ground control about a tumbling piece of their booster rocket which was
flashing in the sky. Certain UFO buffs completely misunderstood the meaning
of the conversation and conjured up a UFO. On the way back to Earth, the
astronauts were puzzled by a light between them and the Earth which turned
out to be the reflection of the moon behind them on the nighttime Indian Ocean
below.
The “UFO” at the right in this NASA photograph is actually an insulation fragment from the Apollo
XI rocket.
Many other “astronaut reports” have been added to this list, including
photographs from Skylab (of a passing satellite, distorted by some camera
artifact), from Apollo lunar flights (movies showing debris floating around
inside the cabin), and from other Mercury and Gemini flights. None, when
investigated with an appreciation of the actual space-flight environment,
appears to be “extraordinary” or “unusual,” although many sightings of passing
satellites remain technically “unidentified” because the actual satellites have
never been named (since nobody has taken the trouble to spend the necessary
time searching computer memory banks).
The entire phenomenon of the “astronaut UFO sightings,” however, does
explicitly demonstrate the carelessness and lack of verification among certain
UFO circles eager to exchange the latest, hottest stories without any regard for
authenticity or accuracy. UFO skeptics have claimed that this characteristic is
not limited to the “astronaut UFO sightings.” The topic is not one to which
some UFO specialists can point with pride in their own behavior and standards
of reliability.
Nevertheless it is still commonly claimed that there exists some sort of
“cover-up” by NASA of secret photographs and/or voice transcripts from space.
In fact, every photograph taken by NASA in space is available for publication
and can be inspected by accredited news media representatives (there are tens
of thousands of photos and no way to arrange public viewing). Volumes and
volumes of voice transcripts are readily available at NASA/Houston.
Astronauts are often quoted about UFOs. Sometimes the “quotations” are
completely fictitious! Only one astronaut claims to have seen a UFO in space;
and that is James McDivitt, who stipulates that his definition of a UFO covers
the probability that his object was some other man-made satellite which has not
been identified. He does not think it was an alien space vehicle or any such
similar “real UFO” manifestation.
—JAMES E. OBERG
atomic bomb and UFOs Imagine a U.S. government project involving many
of the world’s top scientists developing a fantastic new technology, requiring
the services of thousands of workers in three separate locations, yet a project so
secret that not even the Vice President knew about it. “Area 51” perhaps? No, it
was the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.
Of course there was a war on, so the secrecy that surrounded the Manhattan
Project was easier to maintain and more acceptable to the public. Still, it was
extraordinary. The people who lived around Los Alamos, New Mexico (the
scientific center for the project) knew that something was going on at “the Hill”
behind all that barbed wire—they just didn’t know what. The government
deliberately and successfully spread false rumors about project.
Even the test of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity site in New Mexico on
July 16, 1945, the largest man-made explosion ever (at the time), was kept
secret. The test site was remote, but thousands of unauthorized people saw the
explosion. The cover story was that a large ammunition magazine had blown
up. Local newspapers were pressured to not add any additional details or
speculate about other explanations.
A cub reporter for a Chicago newspaper got a call from a man who had been
traveling through the area and told her, in great detail, about the crash of a huge
meteorite. She wrote a short article about it. The next day she found herself
being grilled by FBI agents and as a result promised to write no more about
“the meteorite.”
A few weeks later, after atom bombs had been dropped on Japan, and the
war came to an end, information about what had been accomplished, and how,
began to come out—though the full story would not be revealed for years.
It was the birth of the Atomic Age in 1945—even more than the birth of the
Space Age—more than a dozen years later, that profoundly influenced the
development of UFO beliefs.
People realized that the government was capable of covering up even such
an enormous development. Then there was the psychological impact of “the
Bomb” itself. After the initial “we won the war” euphoria was over, the reality
that humanity had developed the power with which to destroy itself set in.
When flying saucer reports began in 1947, there was much speculation that it
was the atomic explosions themselves that had attracted the attention of the
extraterrestrials.
There was also a widespread belief that nuclear war was inevitable, that the
human race did not have the ability to save itself, and could only be saved by
extraterrestrial intervention. That was the theme of much early UFO science
fiction, like the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and of many of the
early contactee tales of the “Space Brothers.”
This connection—between the atomic bomb and UFOs—was reinforced by
the fact that a large number of the most important UFO cases took place in the
same desert southwest where the Bomb was developed and tested. There was
Roswell, of course, and the variety of other “flying saucer crashes” that were
supposed to have taken place in the same general area. There were many UFO
reports from the area of the Alamogordo Bombing Range, where the Trinity
site was located. Later there was the well publicized Socorro, New Mexico,
case; Socorro being one of the population centers closest to Los Alamos.
—DANIEL COHEN
Aveley (England) abduction On a Sunday evening, the Avis family was

driving home after a visit with relatives at Harold Hill, when they experienced,
first, a UFO sighting, then, a green mist that enveloped their car and a “time
loss” (apparent amnesia) of about three hours. Three years following the
alleged events, timeregression hypnosis was used to “unlock” memories of an
apparent abduction of the Avis family (involving teleportation of their car) by
strange creatures on board the UFO.
The story concerns John and Elaine Avis (pseudonyms), a young married
couple with three children. They had been visiting some relatives at Harold
Hill, Essex (near London), on October 27, 1974, but had been delayed longer
than they had expected. (John had wanted to be home by 10:20 P.M. to see a
particular television program.) The family left at 9:50 P.M. for the normal
twenty-minute drive back to the quiet village of Aveley; and no problems were
anticipated. Karen and Stuart, the two younger children, were asleep on the
back seat, and seven-year-old Kevin was awake, listening to the local radio
station.
Kevin was the first to spot a pale blue, oval light traveling alongside the car
over the open fields. Elaine and John discussed possibilities, but none seemed
to fit properly. They watched for some minutes, as it was intermittently
obscured by trees and scattered houses, alongside the road. They came to
accept the object as a UFO, but thought no more of it than that. As the car
entered some very dark and lonely stretches of road on the outskirts of Aveley,
they saw the light pass across the road in front of them and disappear.
The Avises drove on for about a mile, and were quite close to home. The
time was about 10:10 P.M. Suddenly, the couple was overcome by a feeling that
something was wrong; all sounds in their car seemed to vanish. The radio
started to crackle and smoke, and with an instinctive reaction, John ripped out
the wiring. Then the headlights went out, but not before they had caught sight
of an eerie block of green mist enveloping the road in front of them. The car
jerked as it entered the mist. There was silence and a strange coldness. Then,
within what seemed like about a second, they left the mist with another jerk,
and things apparently returned to normal.
What happened when the car came out of the mist is uncertain. John recalled
only the car being a half mile farther along the road, and feeling as if he were
alone. The car was functioning normally. Elaine’s memory returned yet another
half-mile farther. Kevin was awake, but the other children were still asleep.
Within a few minutes, the family had reached home.
Thinking that there were still several minutes before the TV show he had
planned to watch, John rewired the radio quickly and checked the lighting
system of the car. Elaine took the children up to bed and checked the clock. She
was amazed to find that it was 1 A.M.; almost three hours had vanished.
The next day, Elaine told her mother about the green mist and the strange
light but not about the time loss. They also decided it would be best to forget it.
Apart from a deep weariness the next day, there were no ill effects felt at the
time.
However, over the next three years, the lifestyle of the Avis family
underwent a dramatic change. John had a nervous breakdown, for no apparent
reason, within months. Both he and Elaine then began to gain enormously in
self-confidence. Kevin, who was a backward reader at school, suddenly shot
ahead in leaps and bounds. Within months, the whole family except Stuart
stopped eating meat. In fact, they could not even stand the smell of it. Smoking
and alcohol were also cut out. (John had previously smoked sixty to seventy
cigarettes per day.) Eventually, the couple began to link their behavior change
to the UFO, the green mist, and whatever happened during the missing three
hours. They wanted to find out if there could be a connection, and in mid-1977,
they reported the incident to local UFO investigators.
Andy Coffins and Barry King pursued the investigation for the British
Flying Saucer Review and found that both John and Elaine (Kevin was not
involved in the investigation by mutual agreement) had suffered peculiar
dreams since the experience (which, according to their testimony, were not
discussed with one another until questioned by investigators). The dreams were
about weird creatures and examinations in operating, theater-type rooms.
A qualified hypnotist, Dr. Leonard Wilder, a dental surgeon by profession,
was brought into the case and apparently released memories that had heretofore
been buried in the Avises subconscious minds. After only two sessions with the
hypnotist, John and Elaine began remembering details from that “missing
period” on their own.
A graphic account of the “missing three hours” was obtained. It seemed that,
when inside the green mist, the car (with the Avis family in it) had been
teleported up a column of light into a very large “craft.” John, Elaine, and
Kevin were separated (the other two children remained asleep) and given
“medical examinations” by four-foot-tall creatures looking something like
birds. In contrast to these beings were some tall entities (over six and a half feet
tall) wearing “lurex” suits, and balaclava helmets, who gave John and Elaine a
tour around the ship. The tour included an explanation of the ship’s propulsion
system, and John was even shown a holographic “map” of a section of the
“universe” (galaxy?), which included the aliens’ home planet. (John believes
that visual information was implanted into his brain, to be triggered at a later
date) The Avises were eventually returned to their car, which, in turn, was
teleported back down to a spot on the road, about a half-mile beyond where
they were abducted.
The true nature of this case is difficult to determine or to comprehend. There
is no proof for or against an actual encounter with alien beings, even though,
perhaps, the “abductees” firmly believe that to be the answer. Regardless of the
final outcome of this case, if an explanation is forthcoming, be it from a
physical or psychological perspective, that explanation should add to our
knowledge in one of those two general areas.
—JENNY RANDLES
Avensa airline hoax This photo was originally submitted to the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) by a Mr. Delio Ribas, of Valera,
State of Trujillo, Venezuela, in October 1966. Only the print was available for
analysis, as the negative remained in the possession of the pilot who took the
picture.
In his letter, Mr. Ribas said the photograph was taken sometime in 1965 by a
pilot friend of his employed by the Avensa Airline, while they were on a flight
between the city of Barcelona and the international Maiquetia Airport. He
stated that “...the airline pilot who took the photograph and myself are
absolutely certain that the object is one of the so-called ‘flying Saucers.’ The
pilot does not wish to speak much on the subject because he has been the object
of ridicule by some of his Venezuelan fellow pilots and also certain pilot
friends in the USAF....”
Mr. Fernando de Calvet, a professional topographer and geometrician, made
a study of the position of the shadows and demonstrated mathematically that all
of the objects and details in the photograph have a self-consistent geometry.
Also, Mr. Konrad Honeck, an electronics engineer and Mr. Miguel Sapowsky,
another engineer in charge of the technical department of a large Caracas
television station, substantiated de Calvet’s explanation.
In 1971, the photo was studied by APRO consultant Dr. B. Roy Frieden of
the University of Arizona’s Optical Sciences Center. Dr. Frieden noted that the
“UFO” seemed too sharp to be a large distant object, and then determined that
its shadow was far less dense than the shadow of the plane, indicating that it
had been drawn in. Finally, an engineer in Caracas, Venezuela, confessed to
hoaxing the photo. His motive: revenge against “UFO buffs” who had ridiculed
him for not believing in “flying saucers.”
He did it by placing a photo of a button onto an enlargement of the aerial
shot, which was then rephotographed; he then “burned” in the “UFO” shadow,
when the print was made.
—APRO
This “flying saucer” turned out to be a button superimposed on the background scene.
B
B-57 bomber photo Originally intended as merely a promotional shot of the

Martin (Canberra) B-57 bomber, the photograph—which seems to clearly show
more than one aeroform—found its way to NICAP (the National Investigations
Committee on Aerial Phenomena) and subsequently became a UFO-photo
classic. It was taken near Edwards Air Force Base in California about 1954.
According to Mr. Ralph Rankow, who analyzed the photo for NICAP: “No
one actually reported seeing, with their own eyes, the saucerlike object in the
upper right portion of the picture. Even so, the object evoked such curiosity that
another flight was reportedly made over the same area to look for ground
reflections that might have caused it-although I understand none were
observed....”
Photo of B-57 bomber with apparent UFO (upper-right corner)
Close-up of UFO
“A close scrutiny of the B-57 photo shows the trees, bushes, and houses all
casting long shadows, but the object throws no shadows on the ground
whatsoever. Moreover (and this point is very important), the dark parts of the
object are much too strong to be so far away. As the trees, bushes, and houses
get farther away, the haze cuts down their intensity and contrast. And the
wooded area in the distance directly behind the object is fuzzy and weak by
comparison with the strong highlights and shadows on the UFO itself.
“In my analysis report to NICAP, I also pointed out that the object obviously
had dimension. Its pattern of light and shadow is consistent with the rest of the
picture, with the sun low and coming from the left. The object is also
symmetrically shaped and contains all tones of gray, from white to black.”
The Martin Aircraft Company never could satisfactorily explain what the
second image was. It appeared to be following their B-57 plane in flight,
although they tried to persuade UFO investigators that it was merely a
“scratch” or “rub” on the film. The curious photo underwent a series of
unexplained “touch up” jobs by the Martin Company during the course of their
supplying prints to different UFO investigators.
Three different versions of the photo exist: (1) the original (which is
reproduced here), (2) one with a scratch across the UFO (producing a jagged
appearance), and (3) one with the UFO nearly blotted out. No one could ever
supply a satisfactory reason for the touch-ups, nor a solution to the mystery of
the UFO in the original picture.
—RONALD D. STORY
Baker, Robert A., Jr. (b. 1921). A native Kentuckian and World War II
veteran, Dr. Baker received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of
Kentucky and his Ph.D. degree in psychology from Stanford in 1952. Following
employment as an MIT Research Psychologist and a similar position with the
U.S. Army, Baker also worked as a clinical and forensic psychologist before
teaching and doing research at the University of Kentucky from 1970 to 1990.
Robert A. Baker
Dr. Baker has published over 100 professional journal articles, is editor of
several collections of scientific humor (as well as a history of the American
detective story) and had edited several textbooks. He has also written They Call
It Hypnosis (1990), Missing Pieces (with Joe Nickell), Hidden Memories
(1995), Mind Games (1996), and most recently, he has edited Child Sexual
Abuse and False Memory Syndrome (1999). He is also a Fellow of the
American Psychological Association as well as CSICOP (Committee for the
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and a regular contributor
to The Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptical Briefs regarding UFOs, aliens and
alleged abductees.
3495 Castleton Hill
Lexington, KY 40517
Address:
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: My conviction is that historians of future generations

will look at the current ET hypothesis, with its UFOs and alien abductions, as the
greatest mass delusion of the 20th century—equivalent in all respects to the 19th
century’s Age of Spiritualism with its ghosts, mediums, and seances. What is
truly mind-boggling is the ease with which a few zealous salesmen of the
supernatural convinced millions there was something to their nonsense. Raised
on a steady diet of Star Wars, Star Trek, and The X-Files, and aided by wishful
thinking, pseudo-science and pop-psychology, the average citizen was ready to
be persuaded that the truth was, indeed, “out there” and that an evil and
conspiratorial government was denying him and her their “right to know.” Future
students of the behavioral sciences will, literally, “have a ball” dissecting this
massive irrationality.
—ROBERT A. BAKER
Balwyn (Australia) photo Said to have been taken by a prominent Melbourne

businessman on April 2, 1966, the Balwyn photo has appeared in numerous
.books and films, and is always represented as a “genuine UFO.”
According to the story, at 2:20 P.M. the man was in his garden using up the
remaining film in his Polaroid camera. Suddenly, he said, a bright reflection
caught his eye. As he looked up, he saw a bell-shaped object hovering, on its
side, over a house. The man snapped the photo, whereupon the object
accelerated at great speed and took off in a northerly direction. He estimated
the object was about 20 to 25 feet in diameter and at an altitude of about 150
feet.
However, when the photo was examined by Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization consultant Dr. B. Roy Frieden, Professor of Optical Sciences at
the University of Arizona, he found that the chimney in the lower part of the
photo was more blurred than the alleged UFO, which prompted him to examine
the photo more closely. He then found a jagged line of discontinuity running
across the center of the photo, through the cloud field, which suggests that there
are actually two separate photos joined together and rephotographed to make
the one.
—APRO
Balwyn, Australia, “UFO”
Behind the Flying Saucers (Henry Holt, 1950). Variety columnist Frank
Scully wrote this book based on a series of 1949 columns he wrote for the show
business tabloid describing how two informants revealed to him details of a
U.S. Air Force retrieval, somewhere east of Aztec, New Mexico, of a crashed
flying saucer and its crew of sixteen aliens. Though Scully’s account was
convincingly undermined by other journalists, especially the credibility of his
two witnesses, this tale helped inspire later variations on the story culminating
in the Roswell crashed saucer stories of the 1980s and 90s.
Belgian UFO wave of 1989-90 Over the weekend of November 25-26, 1989,
alarmed citizens from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium reported seeing a
strange luminous disk circling their homes. Later it turned out that the sightings
had been caused by a light show of a disco in Halen (province of Limbourg).
The owner had been trying to attract youngsters by projecting a rotating xenon
lamp onto the cloud-deck. Despite the fact that a local UFO group had
identified the culprit, the light-show continued to spark off UFO reports in the
area until December 16th when, after the Belgian Air Force had sent two F-16
fighter planes into the air in an attempt to identify the mysterious disk, the
Public Prosecutor’s Office ordered the disco manager to switch off his
installation.
THE COMING OF THE TRIANGLES
Meanwhile, another UFO incident had occurred 70 km southeast of Halen.

This time the events were to create waves far beyond the borders of the small
Belgian state. From 5:24 P.M. until 8:39 P.M. on November 29, 1989, two
members of the gendarmerie, driving their patrol car just south of the city of
Eupen (the German- speaking part of Belgium), found themselves entangled in
a cat and mouse game with an unknown flying object.
The policemen described what they had seen as “a dark solid mass in the
shape of an isosceles triangle.” According to their statements, it carried “three
blinding white lights in each corner and a pulsating red light in the centre.” In
the course of the events, the two men had also spotted “a white ball of light”
over the watchtower of the lake of Gileppe with “what looked like beams of red
light shooting out in opposite directions” (investigators later found that Venus
was probably responsible for this phase of the sightings).
Throughout the three-hour incident, the policemen had been in constant
contact with their headquarters in Eupen. Greatly to their relief, the dispatch
officer informed them that he too had seen the triangular object and that
additional sightings were being reported by patrols in nearby communities.
Several witnesses—out of 150 eyewitness accounts that were gathered that
night—mentioned a distinct sound that reminded them of a ventilator. One
policeman reported that he had also noticed “something at the back of the craft
that was turning round, like a turbine.”
SOBEPS COMES INTO PLAY
The next day the story of the Eupen “triangle” was highlighted in the press
and on various Belgian television stations. During the first week of December
1989, members of the Société Belge d’Etude des Phénomènes Spatiaux
(Belgian Society for the Study of Space Phenomena), Belgian’s largest UFO
group, visited the region in search for additional witnesses. It marked the
beginning of the group’s monopoly over the events that were to follow.
The “Beligian Triangle” as sketched by one of the gendarmes who spotted the “craft” over Eupen
on November 29, 1989
December 11-12, 1989 was another memorable day for the Belgian
UFOlogists. That night numerous people in the regions around the cities of
Liège and Namur were baffled by a mysterious illuminated contraption that
sailed over their homes. The sightings came to a strange end when, shortly after
2 A.M., a man in Jupille-sur-Meuse, was awakened by a deep, pulsating sound,
and saw an egg-shaped object that seemed to be stuck in a spruce-fir. The
object carried three bright spotlights underneath and something that looked like
a rudder at the back. On the hull there was a logo reminiscent of classic
symbols that represent the orbits of electrons. It took a few seconds before it
managed to tear itself loose, after which it headed towards the witness, flew
over his house, and finally disappeared in the distance. According to the
witness, the next day Army officers were searching the area.
On December 21, 1989, the Belgian Minister of Defense issued a statement
telling the public that the Army had no idea what was causing the UFO reports.
With no convincing explanations coming from the scientific community either,
speculation and imagination were given free play, and it did not take long
before almost any bright light in the sky was labelled a UFO.
As UFO reports kept pouring in for more than a year and a half, the
popularity of SOBEPS increased at an equivalent pace. New volunteer
investigators were recruited and interviews with members of the group were
published in almost every newspaper and magazine in the country. In two years
time, SOBEPS collected approximately 2,000 eye-witness accounts, some 450
of which were investigated. Most of these cases were regarded as unexplained.
They are detailed in two large books.
The majority of the sightings occurred within an area of about 200 by 100
kilometers in size. While the first series of reports originated from the Dutch-
and German speaking areas in the east of the country, the wave had shifted to
the French speaking part of Belgium in a matter of days. To skeptics, this
illustrated how socio-cultural factors, such as language, population and the
location of UFO investigators, had strongly influenced the reporting process.
They further pointed to the lack of experience of some of the new recruits and
to the fact that SOBEP’s predisposition to promote an extraterrestrial origin for
the events, had diverted the investigators’ attention from looking for down-to-
earth explanations.
THE AIR FORCE CLOSES RANKS
Despite the criticism, SOBEPS managed to earn respect from both

UFOlogists and non-UFOlogists, including the Belgian Air Force. During the
first weeks of the wave, the BAF had been swamped with telephone calls. With
an already chockfull agenda on his hands, Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfried
Debrouwer, later promoted to Major-General, decided to call in SOBEPS. This
marked the beginning of a short but intense relationship which reached its peak
during the Easter days of 1990. During this prolonged holiday weekend of
April 14-17, a Hawker Siddeley and a Brittan Norman reconnaissance airplane
were put at stand-by during a skywatch organized by SOBEPS. The code-name
of this historical collaboration was “Operation Identification Ovni.” Military
men, civilians, investigators and newsmen took part. The only absentees were
the UFOs themselves.
THE EVIDENCE
On July 11, 1990, De Brouwer held a remarkable press-conference at the

NATO headquarters at Evere, Brussels. In the presence of a considerable press
crowd he acknowledged that, on the night of March 30-31, 1990, two F-16
fighters had been scrambled to identify a number of inexplicable lights reported
by a group of gendarmes. Although the pilots never had visual contact with
anything unusual, one of them had managed to videotape the jet’s radar display.
Analysis of the tape by scientists, military experts and skeptics revealed that the
freakish radar returns had been caused by an unusual meteorological condition
in combination with a malfunction of the radar’s electronics. The lights that had
been seen just prior to the scramble were identified as bright stars and planets.
Coincidentally, only minutes after the F-16s had returned to base, a man in
Brussels managed to capture “the flying triangle” on video. The images, shown
on television in many countries, depict the well-known configuration of three
white lights and a pulsating red light in the center. SOBEPS investigators later
found that the witness had filmed an airliner preparing to land at Zaventem
airfield.
As in any modern UFO flap, several videos turned up, the majority of which
showed not only aircraft lights but also bright stars or planets. In one instance
the reflection of sunlight in distant windows was taken for a low hovering
UFO. In another, it was a group of streetlamps that fooled the witnesses.
Various reports were generated by imperfections in the autofocus system of
early generation camcorders. Many of these early systems have problems
focussing on a small point of light. This often resulted in optical oddities that
can transform a bright star into a large—sometimes metallic looking—disk.
One of the rare photographic documents that defied explanation was a color
slide taken in early April 1990 by a young man from Petit-Rechain, not far
from the city of Liège. The photo depicts a black triangle silhouetted against a
dark bluish background. There are white blobs of light in each corner and a
fourth light, surrounded by a reddish aura, in the center. While co-workers of
SOBEPS claim that these lights were probably plasma jets that are part of the
object’s propulsion system, skeptics point to glaring contradictions in the
testimonies of the two witnesses and to the absence of background details in the
picture (making it impossible to verify the object’s actual size and distance).
Famous “Belgian Triangle” photo
Markedly absent during the Belgian wave were reports of electromagnetic

effects. As for traces on ground and vegetation, only four such cases were
recorded for the 1989-1991 period. None of which constituted the slightest
proof of any unusual event.
IN SEARCH OF EXPLANATIONS
Although many cases could be classified as misinterpretations, a
considerable percentage remained puzzling, namely those incidents in which
independent witnesses reported seeing a similar, unidentified object at close
range, during the same night, and within a well-defined area. Three such peak
days stand out: November 29, 1989, December 11-12, 1989 and March 12,
1991.
Teleguided spherical balloon equipped with three spotlights. Some investigators suggested that a
similar construction may have been responsible for at least some of the Belgian sightings.
Researchers skeptical of an extraterrestrial interpretation argued that the

objects described reminded them of ultra light motorized aircraft. This
hypothesis was supported by a rumor that an Air Force pilot had flown a home-
built ULM without the permission of his superiors.
Others suspected that the Air Force was flying state-of-the-art experimental
aircraft, presumably of U.S. design, and was taking advantage of the UFO
excitement to draw public attention away from these secret test flights. The
revolutionary concept of the first generation stealth planes still sparked the
imagination in 1989-1990 and the newest trends in aviation design were also
being reflected in the UFO descriptions. Skeptics scrutinized aviation
magazines for the latest news on obscureBlack Projects. After all, the much
reported configuration of three white lights and a red flashing light was
consistent with standard lighting configuration for aircraft. What they failed to
take into account was that these presumed wonder planes were supposed to be
fast aircraft, not capable of hovering close to the ground, making sharp turns
and producing no down-draft, but only a soft humming sound, as was described
in the best-documented cases.
Several investigators, troubled by these unusual flight characteristics, sought
salvation in the blimp hypothesis, pointing to the “accident” with the blimp-
type object in Jupille-sur-Meuse and to the November 29 sightings. With regard
to the latter they pointed out that, earlier that same day, several independent
witnesses had spotted, in broad daylight, an oval- or cigar-shaped object
traveling slowly south of the lake of Gileppe. Moreover, they discovered that
teleguided blimps, equipped with bright spotlights and a camera, had indeed
been tested in Belgium in late 1989. The owner of these craft turned out to be
an eccentric Hungarian who rented his contraptions for publicity purposes and
was hoping to gather a few orders from the military as well. It appeared that he
had actually contacted not only Major-General De Brouwer, but also the
country’s intelligence services, claiming that he himself had single-handedly
started the Belgian UFO wave and that he would be willing to prove this in
exchange for a big amount of money.
Both the Air Force and the intelligence services gave little credence to the
story and turned the offer down. Surprisingly, the inventor later denied having
ever flown his radio-controlled balloons outdoors, causing even more
confusion. In the end, the only thing that remained certain was that the Belgian
UFOs were an important factor in transforming the traditional nuts-and-bolts
image of the flying saucer into a new high-tech UFO that pops up almost
exclusively at night, looks like a dark, angular structure and carries a panoply
of multicolored lights.
—WIM VAN UTRECHT
Bender mystery (“Men in Black”) In September 1953, Albert K. Bender,

then director of the International Flying Saucer Bureau (IFSB), reported that
three men dressed in black suits had called on him at his Bridgeport,
Connecticut, home and revealed to him the frightening answer to the UFO
mystery. Bender confided to IFSB associates soon afterward that the men,
whose manner had been threatening, had warned him he would be thrown into
jail if he repeated any of the information they had given him.
Gray Barker, Dominick Lucchesi, and August Roberts called on Bender
shortly after the supposed incident and were able to draw a few more details out
of him. He said the three men in black had told him that for the past two years
the United States Government had known the secret of the UFOs. They
claimed, according to Bender, that this secret would be revealed in either five
months or four years. Shortly after the original visit, one of the strangers
returned and imparted additional insight into the mystery, which, Bender said
later, tended to ease some of the fear Bender had experienced during and after
the first meeting.
Apparently the men, or at least the agency they represented, continued to
monitor Bender’s activities. He alleged that once, after he had made a “bad
slip” during a longdistance telephone conversation with another saucer buff, a
call came from Washington, D.C., and a voice warned him to be more careful
in the future.
Soon afterward Bender closed down the IFSB. In the last issue of the
organization’s publication, Space Review, he wrote cryptically, in his first
public allusion to the episode, “STATEMENT OF IMPORTANCE: The
mystery of the flying saucer is no longer a mystery. The source is already
known, but any information about this is being withheld by orders from a
higher source. We would like to print the full story in Space Review, but
because of the nature of the information we are very sorry that we have been
advised in the negative.
“We advise those engaged in saucer work to please be very cautious.”
Bender withdrew from the UFO field and resisted pressure to discuss the
matter further. Although serious UFOlogists viewed his claims with
considerable skepticism, occult- and contactee-oriented saucerians speculated
endlessly about the possible identity of the “Three Men,” as they came to be
called. The Three Men were variously held to be CIA operatives, space people,
evil astral entities, demons, agents of an international Nazi conspiracy, or
agents of an international Jewish conspiracy.
Bender’s former associate Gray Barker, a Clarksburg, West Virginia,
publisher, tirelessly promoted the mystery and started a small industry
specializing in Bender-related materials. Barker’s They Knew Too Much About
Flying Saucers (1956) is an entertaining excursion into the outer reaches of
UFOlogical paranoia which recounted the Bender affair and other similar
alleged silencings of UFO researchers in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
In 1962, Bender suddenly announced he was ready to tell all and did so in a
volume published that year by Barker’s Saucerian Books. The eagerly awaited
Flying Saucers and the Three Men proved a disappointing climax to the nine-
year-old controversy. Even Barker conceded privately that he could not
swallow Bender’s fantastic tale of abduction to the South Pole by monstrous
space beings. Practically everyone who read it, even those ordinarily
predisposed to unbridled credulity, dismissed the book as a work of conscious
or unconscious fiction. Ben- der himself showed minimal enthusiasm for it and
did little to promote it. Soon afterward he moved to Los Angeles and secured
an unlisted telephone number.
But Three Men does shed some light on the background of the Bender
Mystery and points (albeit unintentionally) to the likely solution. It reveals
Bender’s long-time obsession with science fiction, horror movies, and the
occult. Bender, at the time of the alleged visitation a bachelor living with his
stepfather, had converted his section of the house into a “chamber of horrors,”
with paintings of monsters on the walls and shrunken heads and artificial bats
on the tables and shelves. Reading the book one cannot resist an obvious
conclusion—that Bender was ripe for what might euphemistically be termed a
“psychological experience.”
In 1976, Bender, now the director of an organization seeking to perpetuate
the music of film composer Max Steiner, wrote, replying to a letter from a
UFOlogist, “In 1977 something spectacular will take place involving space.” In
this, as in his 1953 prediction that the truth about UFOs would be known in five
months or four years, Bender proved to be a poor prophet.
—JEROME CLARK
Bermuda Triangle-UFO link A popular explanation for the disappearances of

ships and planes in the so-called “Bermuda Triangle” is the “UFO-capture
theory.” Upon close inspection, however, the supposed UFO link is found to be
merely a literary creation without basis in fact.
Over the past half-century, more than a hundred ships and planes, with over
a thousand persons on board, have supposedly disappeared-some say
“mysteriously, without a trace”—in an area variously dubbed “the Bermuda
Triangle,” “the Devil’s Triangle,” “the Hoodoo Sea,” “the Triangle of Death,”
and “the Graveyard of the Atlantic.” It is actually a large area of undefinable
shape around, and including, the triangle formed by Florida, Bermuda, and
Puerto Rico, where sea and air traffic is said to be the greatest. For reasons
which are to follow, some writers have “theorized” a UFO-connection to
explain the “strange” disappearances.
The Bermuda Triangle-UFO link, to missing vessels was perhaps first hinted
at in the 1930s by Charles Fort (1874-1932), who, as his biographer Loren
Gross writes for this encyclopedia, “played with the notion that mysterious
vanishments of ocean vessels and their crews...may be due to wanton seizures
by spacemen.” Two decades later, astronomer Morris K. Jessup (1900-59), in
his book The Case for the UFO (1955), wrote: “To attempt to postulate motive
for space inhabitants kidnapping crews from ships...is in the realm of pure
speculation. On the other hand...our space friends would want to know what
has happened to us since they left, or what has happened to us since they put us
down here. Again, there is always the possibility that the open seas provide an
easy catching place.”
More recently, author Charles Berlitz capitalized on the “Triangle” and a
possible UFO-connection by quoting, in his best-selling book The Bermuda
Triangle (1974), his friend J. Manson Valentine, who reported several UFO
sightings in the area. Berlitz also quoted a reporter by the name of Art Ford,
who claimed that a final radio transmission, picked up by a ham operator from
one of the doomed pilots (in this case, Lieutenant Charles Taylor, flight leader
of the five Navy torpedo bombers that disappeared on December 5, 1945),
contained the warning: “Don’t come after me....They look like they are from
outer space.” (According to a transcript from the Navy Inquiry Board, what
Taylor actually said was: “I know where I am now. I’m at 2,300 feet. Don’t
come after me.”)
Also, there are claims of unusual electromagnetic effects occurring in the
Triangle, a common feature of many UFO reports. Actually, none of the
“magnetic anomalies” claimed about the area are true. Reports of compass
needles spinning crazily have never been substantiated. The fact that the
compass points to true north from the Triangle does not cause confusion, but
rather, simplifies navigation. (The compass points to true north from many
other places in the world. The only part of the Triangle from which it does point
directly north is at the southern tip of Florida.) Those who claim that the north-
pointing compass is strange or confusing lack even the most fundamental
knowledge of magnetism, compasses, or navigation. The presence of a
“Space/Time warp” (whatever that means) is, again, unsubstantiated, to say the
least.
Popular author John Wallace Spencer, in a revised version of his book Limbo
of the Lost (1973), offered a provocative theory: He reasoned that: “Since a
575-foot vessel with 39 crew members disappearing 50 miles offshore in the
Gulf of Mexico, and commercial airliners disappearing while coming in for a
landing cannot happen according to earthly standards and yet are happening, I
am forced to conclude that they are actually being taken away from our planet
for a variety of reasons.”
In a 1975 version of the book, retitled Limbo of the Lost—Today, Spencer
modified his UFO theory so that the extraterrestrials were no longer carting the
captives away from Earth but were taking them to hidden underwater facilities,
where the ETs conducted experiments on the earthlings and their machinery.
But Spencer offered no evidence that UFOs had been present or were even
sighted in conjunction with any of the incidents he described. In other words, it
seems that some authors are apparently dressing up their accounts by including
UFOs in order to attempt to make a bigger story.
The UFO-capture theme was again used in the 1977 movie Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. It turned out that five Navy torpedo bombers that
disappeared in 1945 were taken aboard a gigantic “Mother Ship”; and all of its
captives (who had not aged over the years) were released at the end of the
movie to help demonstrate that the extraterrestrials are indeed friendly after all.
In reality, the “Bermuda Triangle Mystery” has been shown, in The Bermuda
Triangle Mystery—Solved, by Larry Kusche (1975), to be a sham—an
accumulation of careless research, misconceptions, sensationalism, and
downright falsification of data—and is so regarded by most leading UFO
researchers. For example, the 575-foot ship that Spencer claimed had
disappeared was found within two weeks, sunken in shallow water. Volatile
fumes in the holds had exploded, nearly tearing the ship in two. The airliner
that Spencer said had disappeared while on a landing approach was a chartered
DC-3 that lost its way at night in 1948, out of sight of land, because of radio
navigational problems. Thorough investigations of other incidents by Kusche
led to similar “down to earth” explanations.
According to the April 1978 issue of J. Allen Hynek’s International UFO
Reporter: “The Bermuda Trian gle stories...are NOT relayed by the pilots or
sailors who experience them; they are the fraudulent literary distortions of a
small handful of authors. All Triangle mysteries so far have been easily
explainable once the actual records have been examined. Would that the more
baffling UFOs (which are themselves the mysteries) were so easily resolved.”
—RONALD D. STORY
Bethurum, Truman (1898-1969). Truman Bethurum was one of the five major
“contactees” of the 1950s. He claimed to have met Space People on numerous
occasions. He said that the “captain” gave him information about the workings
of “flying saucers” and life on the planet Clarion. Bethurum offered no
evidence to substantiate these claims, and most UFO researchers regard him as
a charlatan.
Truman Bethurum
Bethurum became famous in 1954 with the publication of his book, Aboard
a Flying Saucer. In it, Bethurum claimed that he encountered a landed flying
saucer in the Mojave Desert, where he was laying asphalt for a construction
company. Invited aboard the flying saucer, he said, he met the crew and its
female captain, Aura Rhanes. She explained to Bethurum that she had come
form an idyllic society on the planet Clarion, where there was no war, divorce,
or taxes. Clarion could not be seen from Earth because it was always behind the
moon.
Bethurum struck up a friendship with Aura Rhanes. After the first encounter,
he met with her ten more times at lunch counters and other such mundane
places. During these meetings, she gave more information about Clarion, and
she explained the composition of her “saucer.” Once she tried to aid Bethurum
by predicting what would happen on his job. Eventually, Rhanes invited
Bethurum and some of his guests to take a ride in the flying saucer; but when
the time came, Aura Rhanes and the saucer did not show up, and Bethurum
never saw her again.
Drawing of the lady captain, Aura Rhanes
All but the most desperate contactee advocates have considered Bethurum’s
book to be a hoax. Bethurum stuck by the story and capitalized on it by
appearing on television and radio shows and giving lectures at contactee-
oriented UFO conventions. He was friends with “Professor” George Adamski
and other contactees of the period, and his claims were similar to those of
Adamski, Fry, and Angelucci.
In 1969, Edward U. Condon used nearly two pages of his Condon Rerport to
prove that Clarion could not possibly exist. For Condon, Clarion was evidence
of the gullibility of UFO “believers.”
Bethurum died on May 21, 1969, in Landers, California. The following year,
Timothy Green Beckley published some previously unpublished material by
Bethurum which rehashed the story in his 1954 book and gave additional
details about the planet Clarion. Bethurum’s Aboard a Flying Saucer is now
considered a relic of the 1950s, a time when contactees were “media events.”
Its main importance is as an example of how individuals have tried to exploit
the UFO phenomenon for their own gain.
—DAVID M. JACOBS
POSTSCRIPT: As with the other “contactees,” to regard Bethurum as a simple

charlatan is to miss much of the point. Like the stories of the other contactees,
Bethurum’s classic book, Aboard a Flying Saucer, is rich in metaphors. Take for
example the lady captain, Aura Rhanes, or “Aura Rains”—as we would spell her
name if we thought about what she signifies. Indeed, Bethurum was quite
“taken” by her. She was everything his own wife was not. When one reads the
details in Bethurum’s book about his own life, it is no wonder he required this
kind of fantasy to escape his world of loneliness and uncaring people. A utopian
dream was precisely what he needed.
The flying saucer (called the “Admiral Scow”) as described by Bethurum
When the alien crew brought Bethurum aboard the saucer, he found the
ravishing captain seated at a desk in her cabin. He described her as having short
black hair “brushed into an upward curl at the ends,” and wearing a “black and
red beret” tilted on one side of her head. Her blouse “looked like black velvet,
with short sleeves decorated with a small red ribbon bow”; and she wore a red
skirt that “looked like wool and was set all round in small flat pleats.”
Bethurum remarked that “Her eyes...seemed as if they saw and understood
everything, including the questions I was about to ask even before I was able to
get them out.” (Bethurum, 1954)
Mrs. Rhanes (who was said to have two grandchildren back on the planet
Clarion) explained to Bethurum that the Clarionites had come to Earth only for
their own education (which means for our education, if they are teaching by
example, reading the account metaphorically). But she also mentioned that
other space people might be watching us as well: “you have taken such an
interest in atomic power, some of them might be surveying you. If you blow up
your own planet, it would cause considerable confusion in the Space around
you.”
As for life on Clarion, Captain Rhanes described an idyllic existence: She
told Bethurum that on Clarion there were no such things as prisons, lawyers,
guards at banks, and child delinquency; no divorce or adultery; no illnesses or
doctors, no traffic problems, and definitely no politicians. “That’s what’s cleft
your world through,” she said. Nor was there any use of liquor or tobacco. The
Clarionites were said to be very religious—“Christians” in fact—who “worship
a Supreme Deity who sees, knows, and controls all.”(Bethurum, 1954)
As in the case of Adamski and the other contactees, Bethurum’s account is
shot through with technological metaphors. When he asked Captain Rhanes
about the greatest problem the Clariorites had to solve, he was given this
answer: “It was, of course, learning how to control magnetic force. You know
that we have solved it, both pro and anti of course, or we wouldn’t be here
tonight.” In other words, they have learned the secret of the reconciliation of
opposites. Throughout all the contactee accounts, “magnetic force”
symboblizes primal psychic energy (or libido), which is precisely what man
must learn to control if he is to achieve psyhic balance (and thus survival).
Everything associated with the Clariorites was a model of perfection. The
little men were described as having “masklike faces, without scar or
blemish....” Aura Rhanes, the “queen of women” was rated “tops in shapeliness
and beauty”; She “wore no makeup” because she “needed none,” and couldn’t
be smarter or more capable. The beautiful 300-foot diameter saucer “was
smooth and symmetrical,” magically floating several feet above the ground,
and produced “no noise of any kind at...take-off.” In a word, we are talking
about “Utopia.”
Sociologist David Stupple was the first, I believe, to point out that the
contactees were essentially “utopians,” who envisioned a better world, and
came to believe their own fantasies in pursuit of that goal. “In contactee
parlance a ‘Space Brother’ is not an entity who drops by and gives nonsense
information,” Stupple says, “a Space Brother is a being who visits a contactee
and imparts some special knowledge” so that “by using that information the
contactee can then go forth and help humanity.” (Stupple, 1980) (And for those
who are familiar with the ideas of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, that, of
course, is the archetypal pattern of the “hero’s journey.”)
And speaking of classic examples, I would be amiss if I did not point out the
perfect example of the anima archetype in Aura Rhanes. That she is Truman
Bethurum’s ideal woman goes without saying. What is more subtle, and more
in need of an explanation, is why the feminine aspect of this fantasy requires
such intense projection. I think it is clear in all of the contactee accounts that
the world is in desparate need of more balance between matriarchal and
patriarchal qualities. And what we are missing, of course, is the necessary
addition of more feminine aspects, such as: unconditional love, understanding,
and compassion.
At the request of Aura Rhanes, Bethurum later established a “Sanctuary of
Thought,” dedicated to world peace, understanding, and universal brotherhood.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Bethurum, Truman. Aboard a Flying Saucer (DeVorss & Co., 1954).
________. Messages from the People of the Planet Clarion: The True Experiences of Truman Bethurum.
Beckley, Timothy Green, ed. (Inner Light Publications, 1995).
Gibbons, Gavin. They Rode in Space Ships (The Citadel Press, 1957).
Stupple, David. Quoted in Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress. Fuller, Curtis G., ed.
(Warner Books, 1980).
Bible and Flying Saucers, The (Lippincott, 1968). Presbyterian pastor

Barry H. Downing argues that Biblical events and teachings were deliberately
inspired by visiting extraterrestrial “angels.” His interpretation of the scriptures
indicates that Jesus’ resurrection occurred as he was spirited away by a flying
saucer.
The same sort of space vehicle led the Israelites across the Red Sea by
parting it, spoke to Moses from a cloud, and emitted radiation which produced
the plagues described in Exodus. In other words, Downing substitutes
supertechnology for the supernatural.
Biblical miracles as super-technology Biblical miracles have generally

been explained in one of three ways: they are seen as 1) mythology, 2) as
misunderstood or rare natural phenomena, or 3) they are supernatural. (Note
that interpretation of modern UFOs have followed similar lines.) Connecting
Biblical miracles with UFOs offers a fourth interpretation: super-technology or
more specifically, extraterrestrial science.
The general academic/scientific view of UFOs and Biblical miracles is that
they are mythology. Perhaps driven by unconscious Jungian archetypes,
mythologists argue that stories like the parting of the Red Sea were invented by
humans to comfort and inspire them in what appears to be a godless world.
Then there are those who have taken many of the stories in the Exodus, for
example, to be historical facts—although misidentifications of natural
phenomena. Scientists John Marr and Curtis Mulloy have argued that the
plagues during the Exodus were caused by a “toxic algal bloom.” The late
Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel has argued that the burning bush seen by
Moses was St. Elmos’s fire. Immanuel Velikovsky, in his book Worlds in
Collision (1950), argued that the “pillar of cloud and of fire” (the Exodus UFO)
was the planet Venus making a near pass at the Earth with its gravity causing
the parting of the Red Sea. Those making these kinds of arguments say that the
Biblical people were involved in natural events, which due to their lack of
scientific understanding they called the work of God.
The supernatural explanation of the parting of the Red Sea and other Exodus
miracles is simply this: God can do anything. The miracles are supernatural
events and thus not explainable in logical terms.
Each of the above theories treats the historicity of the story differently.
Those advocating the mythological theory do not require that the parting of the
Red Sea, or any other reported Biblical event, actually occurred.
Those advocating naturalistic explanations accept many of the reported
events as described (the plagues, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea),
but see them as fortuitous natural events (for good or ill). For them, God was
not involved.
The supernatural theory, on the other hand, assumes that the reported events
occurred and were also caused by the supernatural power of God.
Those who support the mythological, naturalistic, or supernatural points of
view do not usually welcome the UFO interpretation of the Exodus. However,
the UFO interpretation supposes that the Biblical reports must be given serious
factual consideration; something the mythological view does not do.
The UFO interpretation takes the Biblical reports as seriously as either the
naturalistic or the supernatural interpretation, but it has an advantage over the
naturalistic view by giving coherence to the reported facts while also making
scientific sense, which the supernatural interpretation makes no attempt to do.
In my book The Bible and Flying Saucers (1968, 1997), I have explored the
Exodus in detail. The Bible says that during the forty-year wilderness journey,
something described as a “pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night”
(Exodus 13:21,22) was constantly present. One might suppose with Velikovsky
that this was the planet Venus or a comet making a near pass at the Earth.
Or one might suppose with Dr. Menzel that the burning bush was St. Elmo’s
fire. But what about the voice Moses heard? (Exodus 3:4) The naturalists
suppose the voice is mythology. But suppose that a UFO landed in a clump of
bushes. Modern UFOs have been reported to cause bushes to glow. And when
modern persons have close encounters, they often report hearing a voice.
One of the most compelling stories that might link the Bible and UFOs is the
story of the parting of the Red Sea.
Could this have been the scene at the parting of the Red Sea?
(Painting by Monarca Lynn Merrifield)
According to the Bible, when the pillar of cloud hovered over the Red Sea,
the voice of God or an angel of God was in frequent voice contact with Moses.
The main point of the Exodus is that Moses was in constant contact with an
intelligent being connected with a UFO, which was cloud-like during the day
and glowing like fire in the dark. It may have been cylindrical in shape like
modern “cloud-cigar” UFOs. This UFO then landed on Mt. Sinai and gave
Moses the commandments for the Jewish religion in verbal and written form.
I believe that a UFO used its power system—some kind of force field—to
part the Red Sea, and when the Egyptians tried to drive their chariots under the
force field, they were knocked flat.
For those who are committed to the Biblical religion, what does this mean?
Were the Biblical miracles carried out by super-technological—rather than
supernatural—beings? If so, how would this effect our religious beliefs? These
questions have yet to be debated in the halls of theology.
The approach I have taken to UFOs and Christianity is this: we need to
wonder a lot more and not shut ourselves off from possibilities.
—BARRY H. DOWNING
Biblical UFOs Strange objects are reported throughout the Bible. In fact, so
many references to UFOs in the Bible exist that a complete list is impossible
here. Most Biblical UFOs can be divided into two categories: (1) those that
seem to be connected with what we might call psychic phenomena and (2)
those that we would now call “multiple witness” sightings. The question of
whether Biblical UFOs and modern UFOs are directly connected has of course
not yet been answered.
Abraham, while in a “deep sleep,” had some kind of UFO experience.
“When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold a smoking fire pot and a
flaming torch passed between these pieces” (Gen. 15:17). Jacob, while
sleeping, had a well-known dream that the angels of God were ascending and
descending on a ladder leading to heaven (Gen. 28:12). These experiences have
traditionally been viewed as spiritual or psychic rather than “objectively real,”
as this phrase is usually understood in modem science. In the modern UFO
field, it must be remembered, however, that some of the most important UFO
research is done by placing persons who have experienced close encounters of
the third kind under a hypnotic trance in order to recover a UFO experience
which someone experienced, apparently in a trance. Thus the modern trance
experience has its twin in the Bible. Whether the famous wheels of Ezekiel
belong in this category is not clear. Ezekiel describes his experience as a
“vision,” which most have assumed means trance, but the former NASA
engineer, Josef Blumrich, in his book The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974), argues
for the objective reality of Ezekiel’s experience.
“And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he
looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.” (Ex. 3:2)
There are important “multiple-witness sightings” in both the Old and New
Testaments. The most important in the Old Testament is the Exodus UFO.
“And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along
the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel
by day and by night” (Ex. 13:21). This UFO, similar to “cloud cigars”
described today, was present during the forty-year Exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt under the leadership of Moses. It is understood to be the same reality
which met Moses in the “burning bush” (Ex. 3:2).
“And as they still went on a talked, behold a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of
them. Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” (II Kings 2:11)
The Exodus UFO is given different names, sometimes called “the cloud,”
sometimes “the glory” of the Lord, sometimes called “the Presence.” It
apparently leads the Israelites to Mount Sinai, descends on Mount Sinai (see
Ex. 19), gives Moses the commandments of the Jewish religion, and dictates
the building of the Tabernacle. Finally, it leads the way to the Promised Land.
Some have argued that the “pillar of cloud and fire” caused the parting of the
Red Sea with its propulsion system and that it dropped the manna for food
during the Exodus. The “pillar of cloud” is called a multiple-witness sighting
because it is understood to have been seen by all the Israelites during all of the
Exodus. (Downing, 1968)
Another famous Old Testament multiple-witness sighting involves the
ascension of Elijah in a “chariot of fire” (II Kings 2). The Bible reports that
about fifty priests witnessed this event.
Multiple-witness sightings in the New Testament include: the shepherds who
saw the angels and the bright “glory” of the Lord at the birth of Christ (Luke
2:9); the “bright cloud” seen by Peter, James, and John during the
transfiguration of Jesus (Matt. 17:18); several disciples witnessing the
ascension of Jesus in a “cloud” (Acts 2:9) as angels explained the event; and
the bright “light from heaven” which blinded the Apostle Paul and brought
about his conversion on the Damascus Road (Acts 9:1-9). Angels are connected
with the “clouds of heaven” in the New Testament, which seem to be
understood as a heavenly form of transportation.
What is the meaning of UFOs in the Bible? Some have suggested that UFOs
in the Bible, like modern UFOs, are mainly an expression of man’s unconscious
needs; that they are myth, creations of man’s mind.
“And it came to pass that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from
the firstborn of Pharaoh... [to] the firstborn of cattle.” (Ex. 12:29)
Others have suggested that UFOs carried “ancient astronauts,” who may
have contacted man for scientific purposes but who never intended to start
religion as we know it.
Another theory is that UFOs started the Biblical religion, either as a kind of
giant interplanetary hoax or because UFOs are in fact a divine reality. This
latter view would see UFOs as carrying the angels of God in the past to start the
Biblical religion and, as still being seen today, shepherds watching over their
sheep.
—BARRY H. DOWNING
References
Downing, Barry. The Bible and Flying Saucers (Lippincott, 1968; Avon, 1970; Marlowe, 1997).
Jessup, M. K. UFO and the Bible (The Cidadel Press, 1956).
birth memories hypothesis The birth memories hypothesis (BMH)

culminated a decade of research into hypnosis and CE-3 reports, including the
Imaginary Abductee Study, which led my colleague Dr. W.C. McCall and me to
a skeptical view of abduction claims. We concluded that abductions are non-
physical, archetypal fantasies involving belief or deception in which the
witness’ perinatal (pre- and post-natal) memories play a central role.
Some basic assumptions of the BMH follow from recent brain research. The
fetus, once described as incapable of thought and memory, is now seen as
keenly responsive to its environment. Of the two memory systems in the brain,
the verbal declarative memory in the hippocampus matures by age four, but the
non-verbal emotional memory, located in the amygdala, is all but matured at
birth. Daniel Goleman writes, “...many potent emotional memories date from
the first few years of life, in the relationship between an infant and its
caretakers. This is especially true of traumatic events, like beatings or outright
neglect.” These “emotional lessons” are stored in the amygdala as “rough,
wordless blueprints for emotional life” and are difficult for an adult to articulate
exactly because they originated before words were there to help the infant
understand experiences. It is our belief that this process typically starts long
before birth, certainly by the tumultuous events of the last trimester of
pregnancy, so that the earliest if not most intense emotional memories in
everyone are prenatal.
Perinatal memories show a strong connection with fantasy, which seems to
encourage access to often-inexpressible emotional memories. For example, one
can relive the ordeal of birth with the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, as
psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has shown, but it can be done somewhat easier
under hypnosis, or even while fantasizing an abduction scenario. Our
hypnotized real and imaginary CE-3 witnesses were giving us figurative
perinatal imagery long before I recognized it, and before I found that Grof’s
birth narratives contain major parallels with abduction imagery. The relation
also works in reverse: some of Grof’s subjects describe hallucinations
involving flying saucers, aliens, and Star Treklike adventures.
UFOs as flying saucers are rich and varied perinatal symbols, but witness
descriptions are usually indirect and metaphorical. Accounts of entering or
leaving a UFO may suggest a symbolic birth: abductees squeeze through small
cervical doors into big rooms, a process clearly analogous to the newborn’s
feelings of decompression at delivery. Or they may exit through a small
passageway to the “big room” outside. Sometimes the birth reference is
explicit, as with the abductee who said she had to twist her shoulders 90
degrees to pass through a little doorway —an exact reliving of fetal rotation in
birth. A few witnesses choose to be reborn repeatedly (as in the Andreasson
case) by passing from one amniotic room to another, through narrow vaginal
tunnels, elevators, exploding doorways, or cervical openings.
Only about half of the CE-3 reports I have seen are substantive and coherent
narratives, yet they all contain some perinatal imagery; many are dominated by
it. The more detailed the narrative, the greater the total birth data—clear
indication of an inherent birth/abduction connection.
The birth memories hypothesis is significant because it is one of the few
falsifiable theories ever proposed about abduction cases. There is no reason
why an actual abduction should stimulate birth imagery in an abductee. On the
contrary, the thought of umbilical pain or birth gore playing any role in
confrontations between humans and alien beings is absurd in the extreme. Birth
imagery is thus a marker showing that abduction claims are non-physical
events. That knowledge gives investigators an evaluative tool of major
importance.
We devised three falsifying tests of the BMH, as follows:
BMH FALSIFICATION TEST #1
The birth memories hypothesis could be wholly or partially invalidated by

any fully developed case narrative lacking substantive perinatal references. But
I know of no such CE-3 case. Below are some random abduction
imagery/events and their probable perinatal connections that could rule out a
claim of alien contact:
• “alien genetics” procedures (overall perinatal experiences)

• birth laboratory (womb & amniotic memories)
• body probing, handling (post-natal exam)
• body dismemberment (normal vaginal passage hallucinations)
• body size change (normal vaginal pressure)
• breathing problems (late stage placental hypoxia)
• center-opening doors (the dilating cervix)
• communication or message (bonding, loving contact)
• fetal humanoid (womb/infant memories)
• floating (fetus in amniotic suspension)
• head, body pressure (normal vaginal birth)
• humming (womb or maternal sounds)
• paralysis (normal vaginal pressure, delivery room swaddling)
• pulsing sensation (placental pulse or maternal heartbeat)
• sense of abrupt motion (in womb as mother moves about)
• tastes or odors (amniotic fluid, postnatal gore)
• time loss, amnesia (emotional memories of perinatal events)
• transparent walls, rooms (translucent amnion)
• tubes of various size (umbilical/placental memories)
• tunnel for boarding/exit (vaginal birth memories)
We propose that cesarean-born volunteers be hypnotized and given

imaginary abductions. If any cesarean narratives contain explicit or figurative
descriptions of head and body pressure or other tunnel and tube experiences,
the BMH would be weakened or proved false.
In the absence of formal replication attempts by other UFOlogists, Dr.
McCall and I gave imaginary abductions under hypnosis to a group of persons
who said they were born by cesarean section. We found statistical evidence that
tunnel imagery in CE3 narratives relates to vaginal birth. Of eight cesarean
subjects in the experiment, seven used no tunnel imagery in describing how
they boarded or left the UFO, and there were few tunnel images throughout
their narratives. The eighth subject exited via a body tube, but she had spent
long hours in a contracting placenta previa (obstructed) womb before an
emergency cesarean, perhaps enough time to imprint a tunnel/tube memory.
We propose that abduction narratives be studied for echoes of problem-birth

witnesses’ birth histories. In the continuing absence of verification attempts by
others, Dr. McCall and I also tested this proposal. Ten volunteers—two normal
births and eight others who reported some birth problem (breech, forceps
delivery, twin birth, etc.)—were hypnotized and given first an imaginary
abduction and then a birth revivification (to avoid birth-CE3 cueing).
Significant correlations emerged in several subjects, particularly when boarding
or exiting the UFO.
Birth images frequently dominate literary, cinematic, and other fantasies
because it is the fantasizing process and not a particular book, film, or other
work that evokes perinatal data. Since Occam’s relentless razor prefers the
simplest alternative, reasonable people should conclude that birth imagery in a
CE-3 report is evidence of perinatal fantasy. No one has read all 5,000
abduction narratives (the current guesstimated number), but CE-3s without
perinatal data seem about as scarce as aliens.
Until one or the other appears, the debate over the reality of CE-3s favors
probable birth fantasies over verified abductions by—more or less—5000 to
zip.
—ALVIN H. LAWSON
Book of the Damned, The (Boni & Liveright, 1919). Charles Fort produces
the first book to chronicle eyewitness accounts in a range of unexplained
phenomena from UFO sightings to rocks and other unusual objects falling from
cloudless skies.
He is the first author to speculate that humankind has been visited and may
be owned by a race of super beings from other worlds who came and
established colonies on Earth for “hunting, trading, replenishing harems, and
mining.”
boundary deficit hypothesis Within the subject of UFOlogy, the boundary-

deficit hypothesis is the proposition that the population of people claiming
nightmare-like abduction experiences will include a statistically significant
proportion of people who have the same psychological characteristics as people
who have nightmares. It derives from studies by Ernest Hartmann who has
shown that people who have frequent nightmares tend to share a large cluster of
common psychological traits that seems to be organized around a central
property of the brain’s predisposition to fuse and mix information and
experience rather than separating such things into distinct categories.
(Hartmann, 1984)
Boundary theory begins with the axiom that as the mind matures, it
categorizes experiences. It walls off experiences into sets with common
properties. Boundaries are set up between what is self and non-self, between
sleep and waking experiences, between fantasy and reality, passion and reason,
right and wrong, masculine and feminine, and a large population of other
experiential categories. This drive to categorize is subject to natural variation.
The determinants of that drive appear to be biochemical and genetic and
probably have no environmental component such as trauma. When the drive is
weak, the boundaries between the categories are thinner, more permeable, or
more fluid. When the boundaries become abnormally thin one sees
psychopathologies like schizophrenia. When abnormally thick, the
psychopathologies tend toward neurotic defensiveness. Hartmann discovered
that individuals who suffer from nightmares have thin boundaries. From this
central characteristic one can derive a large constellation of traits that set these
people apart from the general population.
From earliest childhood, people with thin boundaries are perceived as
“different.” They are regarded as more sensitive than their peers. Thin character
armor causes them to be more fragile and easily hurt. They are easily empathic,
but dive into relationships too deeply and quickly. Recipients of their affection
complain they are unusually close and clinging and thus frequently rejected.
Experience with their vulnerability teaches them to be wary of entering into
relationships with others. Adolescence tends to be stormy and difficult. Adult
relationships—whether sexual, marital, or friendships—also tend to be
unsettled and variable. Paranoia, as measured by the MMPI, has the highest
correlation to thin boundaries. One-third will have contemplated or attempted
suicide. (Hartmann, 1991)
Experimentation with drugs tends to yield bad trips and is quickly
abandoned. They are unusually alert to lights, sounds, and sensations. They
tend to have fluid sexual identities. Bisexuals tend to be overrep-resented in the
nightmare sufferers’ group and it is rare to find manly men or womanly women.
They are not rule followers. Either they reject society or society rejects them.
They are rebels and outsiders. There is a striking tendency for these people to
find their way into fields involving artistic self-expression: musicians, poets,
writers, art teachers, etc. Some develop their empathic talents and become
therapists. Ordinary blue or white collar jobs are rare.
Hartman believes the predominance of artists results from the fact that thin
boundaries allow them to experience the world more directly and painfully than
others. The ability to experience their inner life in a very direct fashion
contributes to the authenticity of their creations. They become lost in
daydreaming quite easily and may even experience daymares—a phenomenon
people with thick boundaries won’t even realize exists. This trait of imaginative
absorption was predicted to make nightmare sufferers good hypnotic subjects
and later tests confirmed this. (Hartmann, 1991) Boundary deficits also
contribute to fluid memories and a fluid time sense.
Hartmann developed a psychological instrument called the Boundary
Questionnaire that reliably discriminates this trait. (Hartmann, 1991) Use of it
makes objective measure of the trait possible and propositions of correlation
testable and falsifiable.
The similarity of many abduction experiences to nightmares should be fairly
obvious. The overarching theme of abduction narratives is powerlessness. This
is manifest not in the mere sense of capture and involuntary scrutiny, but in the
extraordinary variety of dramatic intrusions imposed on the abductee. Pain is
ubiquitous and is reported in nearly every part of the body somewhere in the
literature—head, neck, chest, back, leg, toes, hand, navel, genitalia. Needles,
absurdly big at times, are used to penetrate a variety of points including the
nose, the eye, the navel, penis, anus. Organs have been removed and replaced.
One body is completely ripped apart and put back together. One abductee had
her eye scraped with a knife. Some have their limbs pulled sharply, their hair
pulled, even their heads pulled and squeezed by aliens. Abductees are subjected
to rape, castration, impregnation, abortion, choking, drowning, freezing,
profuse bleeding, temporary blinding, hand cramps, being stripped, and having
their brains scrambled. One is confronted with his personal phobia.
Abductees have also reported sensations of weakness, of hurtling or
tumbling through space, of spinning, of being stuck, of being buried alive, and,
once, of crashing to the ground with a saucer. Most of this is inflicted with no
clear purpose and seems just plain bizarre. There is often detailing that frankly
looks impossible. Aliens and abductees both pass though walls; a possible
symbol of boundarylessness. Eyes are removed from sockets and left hanging
out on the face for a time; anatomically nonsensical. A hocus pocus motion of
the hand relieves the pain of a needle thrust into a navel. Needles go through
the nose and tear into the brain, certain death one would think. Evil alien eyes
paralyze people and overwhelm their souls. There is out-of-body travel and
telepathy. And let’s not get started on all the apocalyptic visions, failed
predictions, and misinformation that has come from abductions.
Much of this parallels, sometimes precisely, sometimes in a more general
way, what happens in nightmares. There are the basic childhood fears like
completely dissolving or being destroyed; fear of mutilation, castration, loss of
body parts, fear of isolation and abandonment; fear of loss of sustenance and
love; and an inability to control the body. There are chases, capture, torture,
imminent catastrophe, wild kinetic sensations, and eerie background scenes.
Regarding the last, it is especially damning how fog often finds it way into
abduction experiences, a detail common to horror stories and one seen
endlessly in science fiction movies and TV programs with a lineage stretching
back Lovecraft.
Certain correlative features to abductions could readily be accounted for. So
called “missing time” could result from a fluid time sense. Forgotten scars are
reinterpreted due to a fluidity of memory. Dramatic reactions to mundane
stimuli like lights leading to misinterpretations might reflect stimulus
sensitivity and paranoia. Good hypnotizability would preferentially yield
emotionally authentic behavior. When such correlates are used in a diagnostic
fashion by abductologists, they may be screening away thick-boundaried
people in favor of people with thin boundaries.
The likelihood that abductees with such nightmare experiences shared the
same psychological profile as nightmare sufferers was strongly suggested by
several points of correspondence between thin boundary traits and an early
psychological study of abductees. UFOlogists regarded the Slater psychological
study of nine abductees as an experimentum crucis for the view that abductees
are victims of real extraterrestrial intrusions. It affirmed not only the normality
of abductees, but offered a hint of traumatisation in the finding that abductees
showed a tendency to show distrust and interpersonal caution. Yet this was only
part of the story.
Slater found the abductees had rich inner lives, a relatively weak sense of
identity, particularly a weak sexual identity; vulnerability; and an alertness
characteristic of both perceptual sophistication and interpersonal caution.
(Hopkins, 1984) She also volunteered the opinion that her test subjects did not
represent an ordinary cross-section of the population. She found some were
“downright eccentric or odd” and that the group as a whole was very
distinctive, unusual, and interesting. “This last nicely paralleled Hartmann’s
observation that those of the nightmare group are perceived as “different” from
“normal” people. Indeed all four of the reported commonalities are
parsimoniously accounted for by thin boundaries.
By contrast, Slater had to multiply assumptions to account for weak sexual
identities—she suggested forgotten involuntary surgical penetrations by aliens
in childhood might have traumatised them. The uncertainties there are
threefold: Did her nine subjects actually claim abduction experiences extending
back to childhood? Should experiences that a person is unaware of affect one’s
sexual identity? Should surgical experiences per se even weaken sexual
identity?
Also favoring the hypothesis was the unusual proportion of creative artists
and therapists evident in the abductee population. Virtually anyone can satisfy
for themselves their ubiquitous presence in abductee literature; Whitley
Strieber’s award-winning horror fiction and Betty Andreasson’s having won
prizes in many art contests being prime examples. Hopkins reports many
mental health professionals among his abductees: two psychiatrists, three PhD
psychologists, and an unstated number of psychotherapists with Master’s in a
population of 180 claimants. (Hopkins, 1988) This is demonstrably a hundred
times greater than one could expect by chance based on government figures. A
look at Mack’s first book shows eight of its thirteen subjects had artistic and
therapeutic backgrounds. (Kottmeyer, 1994)
There has been only one formal test of the hypothesis using Hartmann’s
Boundary Questionnaire. David Ritchey, as part of a larger investigation into
abductees being psychologically sensitive, included the questionnaire among
several test instruments. The results were unambiguous. The average boundary
score of the abductees was 305, which was thinner than average and consistent
with the scores of Hartmann’s nightmare sufferers. (Ritchey, 1994) The obvious
caveat to Ritchey’s study is that it involved only fourteen subjects; a small
sample, though larger than Slater’s study.
The main criticism to date of the general proposition has been by Stuart
Appelle who argues that the test findings of Spanos are not fully consistent with
the cluster of personality traits predicted. (Appelle, 1995-96).
The Spanos study was not however limited to abductees with nightmarish
experiences. Nine of thirty-one subjects with complex UFO experiences felt
they had positive experiences and fifteen, just under half, rated their experience
as negative. (Spanos, 1993) This renders application of boundary theory
problematic. Other studies of the personalities of abductees have not directly
addressed the boundary issue, but the consistent finding of paranoia scores
higher than normal on standard MMPI tests points to sensitivities that look
consistent with the thin boundary proposition. Further testing might resolve the
issue more clearly in the future.
References
Appelle, Stuart. “The Abduction Experience: A Critical Evaluation of Theory and Evidence,” (Journal of
UFO Studies, 1995/96).
Hartmann, Ernest. Boundaries of the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality (BasicBooks, 1991).
________. The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams (Basic Books, 1984).
Hopkins, Budd. “Abductees are ‘Normal’ People,” (International UFO Reporter, July/August 1984).
________. “UFO Abductions—The Skeleton Key” in MUFON 1988 International UFO Symposium
Proceedings (MUFON, 1988).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Testing the Boundaries,” (Bulletin of Anomalous Experience, August 1994).
Ritchey, David. “Elephantology—The Science of Limiting Perception to a Single Aspect of a Large
Object, Parts II & III,” (Bulletin of Anomalous Experience, December 1994).
Spanos, Nicolas, et. al. “Close Encounters: An Examination of UFO Experiences,” (Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 1993).
Breakthrough (HarperCollins, 1995). Whitley Strieber concludes in this book

that alien visitors compose a large number of familial groups who have become
a part of the interior life of humans. He bases this conclusion on 139,914 letters
he received between 1987 and 1994, in the aftermath of his Communion book,
from persons describing their own alien encounters. These correspondents from
all over the world gave a multitude of descriptions of their abductors ranging
from insects and cat people to Greek gods and beams of light.
British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) Originating in 1959 as the

London UFO Research Organization, what was once LUFORO became
BUFORA in 1964.
Today BUFORA is a nationwide network of about four hundred people who
have a dedicated, non-cultist interest in understanding the UFO mystery. Within
that membership are many active investigators and researchers working with
the direct claims of witnesses to collate the data necessary to bring that
understanding nearer.
A loose federation of U.K. regional UFO groups called the British UFO
Association was formed in 1962. Over the next two years many of these groups
decided to amalgamate all their activities under the BUFOA banner; so the
organization was renamed the British UFO Research Association in 1964.
Benefits to members include BUFORA’s principal publication, which is the
BUFORA Bulletin, a bi-monthly magazine of current interest articles.
The three aims of BUFORA are:
1. To encourage, promote and conduct unbiased scientific research of

unidentified flying object (UFO) phenomena throughout the United
Kingdom
2. To collect and disseminate evidence and data relating to unidentified flying
objects
3. To coordinate UFO research throughout the United Kingdom and to
cooperate with others engaged in such research throughout the world
Research and Investigation Activities.
In pursuit of its aims, BUFORA supports active investigation and research

teams. The investigation team carries out on site field investigation of cases,
whilst the research team is involved in activities such as statistical research and
technical support activities.
There are approximately fifty investigators and trainee investigators spread
around the country. Trainee investigators are expected to work with an
experienced investigator and to undertake a postal training course. These are
supplemented by guidance notes. Investigators are expected to work to a Code
of Practice.
BUFORA disseminates its findings and updates through several means:
• A lecture programme.
• UFO Telephone hotline.
• Publications.
• Internet.
70 High Street
Wingham
Address: Kent CT3 1BJ
England
E-mail: enquiries@bufora.org.uk
Web site: www.bufora.org.uk
Buff Ledge (Vermont) abduction Located on the Vermont side of Lake

Champlain, north of Burlington, Buff Ledge Camp for girls became the scene
for a dual-witness UFO abduction episode on August 7, 1968.
THE ENCOUNTER
Just after sunset “Michael Lapp” (a pseudonym), 16, who maintained the
camp’s waterfront equipment, and “Janet Cornell,” 19, the water-skiing
instructor, stood together on the end of the dock. Most of the campers and
counselors were away on a two-day break
As the two coworkers watched the western sky, a white cigar-shaped object
appeared over the lake. Before departing, it released three small round objects
which performed a series of acrobatic maneuvers. Then two of the satellite
objects accelerated out of sight.
The remaining UFO headed directly toward the amazed witnesses and
stopped within about ten feet from the end of the dock. Michael, who retained
more conscious recall of the whole experience than Janet, described a classic
“flying saucer,” complete with transparent dome and revolving multicolored
glowing rim. The object emitted a vibratory hum, he said.
While the female witness appeared frozen in a trance, her associate reported
two short entities behind the dome clothed in tight-fitting uniforms. They had
large heads, big oval eyes, and a small mouth. Michael was told telepathically
they were from a distant planet and that he would not be harmed.
Next the craft moved overhead and a brilliant beam of light came on
underneath, bathing the two in its glow. Michael, and presumably Janet, lost
consciousness.
When the teens became aware again it was totally dark out, and they could
hear the voices of campers returning from a swim meet. A tree-covered bluff
and pavilion partially concealed the scene below on the dock. But Michael said
two of the swimmers, “Susan” and “Barbara,” rushed down to the top of the
bluff, perhaps attracted by the UFO’s glow, and must have seen the object at
that moment as it angled upward and disappeared across the lake.
AFTERMATH
Both primary witnesses felt extremely tired afterward and fell asleep in their
separate quarters. Although Michael remembered the close encounter and the
entities, Janet apparently recalled only moving lights in the sky. Not wishing to
traumatize his friend, Michael said he decided not to discuss with her what had
taken place. The camp closed and the two participants went their separate ways.
TEN YEARS LATER
After ten years had passed, the male witness said he had come across Dr.
Allen Hynek’s name and promptly called the Center for UFO Studies, which
put him in touch with me. Thus began a five-year investigation into an
experience—significant for its uncontaminated testimony; the two witnesses
had never discussed with one another their shared encounter with the UFO.
During separate hypnosis sessions, not only did Michael fill in his “missing
time” with an abduction scenario, but so did his female counterpart.
SIMILAR ACCOUNTS REVEALED
There were remarkable similarities between their accounts. Both individuals

recalled being inside the UFO’s dimly lit interior. Their captors were described
similarly as having large elongated heads, big eyes, two nasal openings, and a
mouth-slit. Each abductee had a “guide” who kept in telepathic contact with
them throughout the experience. While Janet felt herself being probed and
inspected by strange figures (she was instructed to keep her eyes closed),
Michael stood nearby with his “guide” and watched the examination. He said
this included taking blood and skin samples and extracting vaginal fluid
(eggs?).
Michael’s drawing of close-encounter UFO as seen from the dock. Two entities were visible
through the dome. Glowing plasma-like energy moved around the furrowed rim. Square plates
covered the UFO on both top and bottom surfaces.
While two entities conducted the actual examination on Janet, a third figure
monitored a console below an array of screens. The displays appeared to
register various parts of the exam. Independent confirmation of this monitoring
array by both witnesses provided strong evidence for a shared abduction
experience.
MICHAEL’S JOURNEY
Though Michael had no memory of the tests performed on him during his
own physical examination, he apparently remained aware through much of the
encounter, and consequently his overall experience was more detailed. During
his hypnotic regressions, the male subject spoke of a journey he and his guide
took through a “mother ship” into which the abduction craft had entered.
His tour included riding a tube of light across a giant hangar, the placement
of a helmet on his head which conveyed some sort of imagery to a curved
screen, and the presentation of a park-like landscape where Janet joined him.
After this, Michael sensed himself falling through space and then waking up on
the dock next to his coworker.
SUPPORTING WITNESSES?
A persistent search turned up three possible supporting witnesses to both the

UFO’s abduction departure and its final exit from the dock. They were the two
swimmers “Susan” and “Barbara,” and the camp’s playhouse director “Elaine.”
Unfortunately, the exact dates of their sightings could not be confirmed.
Michael’s drawing of one of the aliens
I subjected the two abductees to extensive psychological tests, including the

Psychological Stress Evaluator (voice analysis), and to background character
checks. Both individuals appeared to be honest and credible. A hoax or some
sort of shared hallucination was ruled out.
—WALTER N. WEBB
NOTE: For more information, see the full account in Walter Webb’s book
Encounter at Buff Ledge: A UFO Case History (J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO
Studies, 1994).
Bullard, Thomas Eddie (b. 1949). Thomas Eddie Bullard was born in North
Carolina and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and
Indiana University, where he received his Ph.D. in Folklore. A lifelong interest
in UFOs led to a dissertation on UFOs as modern folklore and articles treating
the same theme in the Journal of American Folklore, Magonia, International
UFO Reporter, and the Journal of UFO Studies.
Under sponsorship of the Fund for UFO Research, Dr. Bullard carried out a
comparative study of abduction reports, UFO Abductions: The Measure of a
Mystery (1987), and a comparative survey of abduction investigators, The
Sympathetic Ear (1995). He participated in the Abduction Study Conference
Held at M.I.T., while his articles on UFO waves and historical UFOlogy appear
in Jerome Clark’s UFO Encyclopedia (1998). He serves on the boards of the
Center for UFO Studies and the Fund for UFO Research.
517 E. University St. #2

Address: Bloomington, IN 47401
U.S.A.
Thomas Eddie Bullard
POSITION STATEMENT: There is no question in my mind that people have

seen strange objects in the sky and have undergone unusual experiences in the
presence of these objects. I am also convinced that any hard and fast conclusions
about the nature of these objects is premature.
Only scientific investigation of reports and a better understanding of the
witnesses, as well as the interaction between observation and belief or cultural
expectation, will set conclusions on a solid foundation. Until then I will admit
that some reports seem unlikely to evaporate into any conventional explanation,
but the human mind is full of surprises, and human ability to err in observation
appears boundless. All in all the best position to me seems one of speculative
restraint and investigative vigor.
C
Case for the UFO, The (The Citadel Press, 1955). Astronomer Morris K.
Jessup says in this book that UFOs have been present throughout human history
and these visitors, operating from bases perhaps on our own Moon, are
abducting human beings.
Jessup beat Erich von Däniken by more than a decade in describing how
megalithic structures worldwide, from the Nazca lines in Peru to the Easter
Island statues, could be the calling cards of extraterrestrials. He also was the
first author by fifteen years to describe “Bermuda Triangle” areas where ships
and planes “vanished without a trace.”
Cash-Landrum UFO encounter Three Texans encountered a UFO while

driving on a dark, lonely road near Huffman, Texas, on December 29, 1980.
They suffered lifethreatening injuries as a result of the encounter.
Betty Cash (51), Vickie Landrum (57) and Vickie’s grandson Colby (7),
were driving on the Cleveland-Huffman Road on the way to their homes in
Dayton, Texas, when they spotted the UFO. It was about 9 P.M. and the road
was deserted. The first indication of something unusual was the presence of a
very intense light several miles ahead just above the pine trees. Betty remarked
about the unusual brightness, but temporarily lost sight of it due to the many
trees along the road.
Suddenly, hovering over the road only a short distance ahead was an
enormous diamond-shaped object. “It was like a diamond of fire,” Vickie said.
The glow was so intense they could barely stand to look at it. Vickie at first
thought it was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and expected Jesus to come
out of the fire in the sky.
In addition to lighting up the whole area like daytime, the UFO periodically
belched flames downward. Fearing they would be burned alive, Betty stopped
her 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass without leaving the road. They all got out of the
car to escape the heat and to get a better took at the UFO. Colby was terrified
and dove back into the car, begging his grandma to get back in, too. Vickie
quickly reentered the car and comforted Colby.
Artist’s depiction of the UFO
Betty stood momentarily by the driver’s door and then walked forward to the
front of the car. After much pleading by Vickie, Betty finally returned to the
car; but the door handle was so hot he had to use her leather coat as a hot pad to
open the door. Although the winter night air was only about 40 degrees, the
heat from the UFO caused the witnesses to sweat and feel so uncomfortable
that they turned on the car’s air conditioner.
The sound from the UFO would increase each time it shot flames
downward, but the intense glow never changed. In addition, the threesome
heard an irregular beeping sound throughout the encounter.
Finally, the flames stopped and the object rose to the southwest and was lost
from sight. Vickie and Colby commented that they could also see several
helicopters and they seemed to be following the UFO. Betty started the car and
headed for Dayton.
Betty was outside the car and directly exposed to emanations from the UFO
for five to ten minutes. Vickie was outside for a much shorter time and Colby
was exposed for only a minute or so.
As Betty raced homeward bound, she turned right on to highway FM-2100.
Five minutes had lapsed since the encounter and just ahead of the car they
could see the UFO and a large number of helicopters. “The sky was full of
helicopters,” Betty said. Some were near the object and others lagged behind.
Betty pulled the car to the side of the road and waited for the entourage to get
out of the way. It was then, they counted more than twenty helicopters, many of
them with twin rotors on top.
December 29th was a turning point in their lives. Betty, an unusually
energetic woman, had plans to open a new restaurant the following week.
The sickness that followed the incident ruined those plans. Betty did not
know it, but she would never work again. For the next four days, Betty’s health
degenerated. Red blotches on her skin became blisters of clear fluid, her eyes
swelled closed, and she was weak from dehydration. At the same time Vickie
and Colby were experiencing similar ills, but to a slightly lesser extent than
Betty.
Betty was hospitalized for twelve days, went home briefly, but returned to
the hospital for another fifteen days. The blisters caused a significant amount of
skin loss and by the end of the third week she was losing a significant amount
of her hair. Betty was also suffering from diarrhea, stomach distress, and severe
headaches.
Vickie treated Colby and herself with home remedies. She also lost some
hair, suffered some eye-damage, had diarrhea, stomach distress, and headaches.
Colby’s maladies were similar.
SUMMARY OF MEDICAL EFFECTS

Vickie, Betty, and Colby
Although others also witnessed the UFO and the helicopter activity that
same evening, various military agencies denied participating in the incident.
With the help of Senators Bentsen and Towers, a meeting was arranged with
U.S. Air Force attorneys at Bergstrom Air Force Base to get to the bottom of
the situation. Other than a suggestion that Betty and Vickie might want to file a
claim against the U.S. government, nothing else came from the meeting.
With the assistance of private attorney Peter Gersten, they did file a claim
against the government for damages, which was denied. Then they filed for
damages in the U.S. District Court in Houston, Texas. After months of activity
in the discovery process, the judge finally refused to hear the case and their
hopes of medical or any other kind of help were squashed.
Neither Betty nor Vickie ever worked again. Betty lost her businesses and
moved to Alabama, where her family could care for her. She was hospitalized
several times each year and many of those visits were in the Intensive Care
Unit. Betty’s life ended on December 29, 1998, exactly 18 years after the UFO
encounter. By the fifteenth anniversary of the event, Vickie’s health had slowly
recovered. After several years, Colby overcame the physical and emotional
impact of the event and became a productive adult.
Betty and Vickie requested that the investigators of this case make it known
as broadly as possible, so that others who might experience the same thing in
the future would know what to expect.
—JOHN F. SCHUESSLER
For more information, see John Schuessler’s book, The Cash-Landrum UFO
Incident (1998), available from MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network, P.O. Box
369, Morrison, CO 80465 U.S.A.).
categories of UFO reports The following classification system is now the

most widely used among UFOlogists and popular journalists around the world:
RELATIVELY DISTANT SIGHTINGS
1) Nocturnal Lights. These are sightings of well-defined lights in the night sky
whose appearance and/or motions are not explainable in terms of conventional
light sources. The lights appear most often as red, orange, or white. They
represent the largest group of UFO reports.
2) Daylight Disks. Daytime sightings are generally of oval or disk-shaped

metallic-looking objects. They can appear high in the sky or close to the ground
and are often reported to hover. They can seem to disappear with astounding
speed.
3) Radar/Visuals. Of special significance are unidentified “blips” on radar

screens that coincide with—and confirm—simultaneous visual sightings by the
same or other witness(es).
RELATIVELY CLOSE SIGHTINGS

(within 200 yards)
1) Close Encounters of the First Kind (CE-I). Though the witness observes a
UFO nearby, there appears to be no interaction with either the witness or the
environment.
2) Close Encounters of the Second Kind (CE-II). The encounters include

details of interaction between the UFO and the environment, which may vary
from interference with car ignition systems and electronic gear to imprints or
burns on the ground and physical effects on plants, animals, and humans.
3) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE-III). In this category, occupants

from a UFO (entities of more or less humanlike appearance now referred to as
“humanoids,” or nonhuman creatures) have been reported. There is usually no
direct contact or communication with the witness, but there have been some
reports, increasing in recent years, of incidents involving very close contact with,
and even temporary detainment of, the witness(es).
Since Dr. Hynek’s death in 1986, two more categories of close encounters
have entered the UFO lexicon:
4) Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (CE-IV). This category makes the
jump from mere sightings to kidnappings or abductions. In these cases, the UFO-
related entities take the witness (or abductee) to another place, either mentally or
physically.
5) Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (CE-V). This category involves human-
initiated contact with a UFO and/or its occupants. In these cases, the witness (or
contactee) deliberately establishes contact with the UFO—via signaling or
mental telepathy—and receives a like response.
—J. ALLEN HYNEK & RONALD D. STORY
Chalker, William C. (b. 1952). Bill Chalker is one of Australia’s most

prominent UFO researchers and has written extensively on the subject.
William Chalker
Born in Grafton, New South Wales (NSW), Australia, Mr. Chalker was
educated at the University of New England, graduating with an Honours
Science Degree (B.Sc. Hons.) with majors in chemistry and mathematics. Since
1975 he has worked as an industrial chemist, laboratory manager, and quality
manager. He is also a contributing editor for the International UFO Reporter
and coordinates the NSW UFO Investigation Centre (UFOIC).
Chalker was the Australian representative for the Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization (APRO) from 1978 to 1986 and NSW state
representative for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) from 1976 to 1993.
His first book, The OZ Files: the Australian UFO Story, was published in
1996.
P. O. Box W42
Address: West Pennant Hills
NSW, 2125, Australia
E-mail: bill_c@bigpond.com
POSITION STATEMENT: Although the UFO problem has been under scrutiny
for several decades, only the last few years have seen any real major advances in
the study of the subject. It is fast becoming a serious area of scientific study, and
only recently has it started moving beyond the area of casual inspection. Even
though civilian groups have conducted an often remarkable documentation
program during the past few decades, only in the past few years has the UFO
subject been worthy of legitimate scientific study.
Clandestine inquiry has been replaced by serious open inquiry, and a solid
data base has been established. It is this documented data that science should
seriously examine.
While the present data does not support any one clear hypothesis of origin
and nature of the UFO, it certainly indicates without question the existence of a
new empirical phenomenon.
Localized flaps that are ongoing can bring UFO research under the scrutiny
of direct experimentation, which can provide us with the repeatable phenomena
that legitimate science accepts. Personal experience has shown that such
research activity yields considerable data, and it is this sort of data that will
thrust UFOs into the mainstream of scientific inquiry.
—WILLIAM C. CHALKER
channeling Considered to be a form of interdimensional communication in

which a non-physical intelligent being—not necessarily but often
extraterrestrial—speaks through a human being in some form of trance.
Channeling is one form of telepathy, which is not a new phenomenon, although
it does figure prominently in modern New Age literature. Instances of inspired
revelation and spiritual communication can be found in the Christian Bible, as
well as in the scriptures of almost all human religions, globally and historically.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Chariots of the Gods? (Econ-Verlag, 1968). Swiss hotelier Erich von

Däniken, in this, his first and most widely circulated (reportedly 40 million
copies) of many books on the ancient astronaut theme, seizes upon every
megalith, every seemingly technological vestige of lost civilizations, practically
every known myth or religious tale that mentions gods from heavens, to make a
case that conventional theories of history and archaeology cannot explain the
evolution of human intelligence. Though he doesn’t know who they were, or
where they came from in space, those “gods of the distant past” who were
extraterrestrial visitors “annihilated part of mankind” to produce Homo
Sapiens. He gives partial credit for his findings to a rediscovery of “knowledge
that was hidden in the libraries of secret societies,” groups he doesn’t name or
mention again beyond the introduction.
chupacabras The anomalous entity known as el chupacabras—the

“Goatsucker”—has been described by witnesses as standing between four and
five feet tall and covered in greenish brown or blackish gray fur, with spindly
arms ending in claws, powerful hind legs enabling it to jump over fences, a thin
membrane under its arms that have been described as “wings,” and glowing red
eyes. A proboscis emanating from the creature’s mouth, allegedly employed to
suck its victims’ blood, has also been reported.
Artist’s impression of el chupacabras, the “goatsucker”
Mutilations had been reported on the island of Puerto Rico since the 1970s
with the depredations of the notorious “Moca Vampire,” but it was not until
March 1995 when the strange animal mutilations would replay themselves in a
way that would attract media attention to the locality of Saltos Cabra outside
Orocovis, Puerto Rico. A number of farm animals had turned up dead on the
property of Enrique Barreto.
Researchers found strange three-toed footprints covering the ground and
ruled out an attack by a feral dog or cat, since canines and felines have four
toes. Further analysis proved there was an 18-inch distance between footprints,
suggesting that whatever creature they belonged to was bipedal rather than
quadrupedal. Its weight was estimated at between 120 and 140 pounds.
In August 1995, Madelyne Tolentino of the coastal town of Canóvanas
would have the distinction of being one of the first witnesses to the creature.
Ms. Tolentino became aware that a strange creature was approaching the house
at a moderate pace, allowing her to take a good, long look at the aberration.
Whatever it was stood four feet tall and had a pelt covered in a mixture of
colors ranging from brown to black and ashen gray, as if it had been burned.
On September 29, 1995, the creature killed an assortment of rabbits, guinea
hens, and chickens at a farm in Guaynabo, P.R. A week later eyewitnesses
claimed to have seen a beast “hairy like a bear” in Canóvanas again. On
October 29th, Canóvanas mayor José “Chemo” Soto led a series of nightly hunts
for the creature, equipping his posse with nets, tranquilizing dart guns, and
other non-lethal means. It represented the first response against the
bloodsucking visitor from anyone in an official capacity. The balance of 1995
was filled with senseless animal deaths and a choking feeling of terror among
rural residents.
A case could perhaps be made for paying little attention to the chupacabras
if it had remained circumscribed to the island of Puerto Rico. But in February
1996, the chupacabras killed forty-two animals in Miami, Florida.
Eyewitnesses in northwestern Miami reported seeing a creature walking erect
and covered with thick matted hair at the scene of the attacks. The “Florida leg”
of aberrant predatory activity ran from February through July 1996.
Mexico’s turn would soon be next: in May 1996, Teodora Ayala Reyes, a
resident of the village of Alfonso Genaro Calderón in Sinaloa, became the
chupacabras’ first human victim, presenting what appeared to be “burn marks”
on her back, exactly where the creature had clawed her. The seaside village was
further wrenched out of obscurity after reports of a colossal bat-like creature
stalking the area became widespread. All manner of farm animals were being
found dead by their owners.
Reports soon followed from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras and as far
south as the Amazon Basin. Guatemalan farmer Vicente Sosa thought he had
seen a black dog with a long tail that suddenly increased in size, becoming a
red-eyed beast with enormous eyes. Researchers visited the site of a
chupacabras attack on chicken coops in the Estanzuela region, and remarked on
the high radioactivity readings found in the area.
The southern U.S. soon produced its very own chupacabras sightings. In
mid-May 1996, Sylvia Ybarra went out to her backyard in the Texas town of
Donna only to find that her pet goat had been killed by three inflamed puncture
wounds to its throat. The animal had been felled near its shed.
The events surrounding the chupacabras’ initial eruption into popular
awareness are now many years behind us, allowing for a less heated
atmosphere in which to debate its origin and even its existence. Skeptics
refused to look at the evidence, offering the same tired explanations for the
mutilations (feral dogs, apes, Satanists), but never explaining the face-to-face
encounters with humans or the odd radiation signatures found in Puerto Rico
and Central America.
—SCOTT CORRALES
Clark, Jerome (b. 1946). Jerome Clark has been active in UFOlogy since the
early1960s and is a much-published writer on UFO and Fortean subjects. He is
also a songwriter (with Robin and Linda Williams) whose compositions have
been recorded by Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tom T. Hall, and
other country, folk, and bluegrass artists. He has a wide range of historical,
cultural, and literary interests.
Born in Canby, Minnesota, Clark attended South Dakota State University
(Brookings) and Moorhead State University (Minnesota), majoring in English
and political science. Between 1976 and 1989 he was an editor of Fate
magazine. Since 1985 he has edited the International UFO Reporter, the
magazine of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. He is the author of
two editions of The UFO Encyclopedia. The first was published in three
volumes between 1990 and 1996. The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon
from the Beginning, the second edition, appeared in two volumes in 1998. Clark
has won a dozen literary awards for his writings. In 1992 he won the Isabel L.
Davis award, bestowed by the Fund for UFO Research, for his contributions to
rationality in UFO study. He has written some fifteen books.
In 1989, after years in the Chicago area, he moved back to his hometown,
where he now lives and works.
612 N. Oscar Ave.

Address: Canby, MN 56220
U.S.A.
E:mail: jkclark@frontiernet.net
POSITION STATEMENT: After a lifetime in this subject, I have concluded that

the extraterrestrial hypothesis is one reasonable tentative approach to putting the
best-documented and most puzzling UFO reports into a scientifically defensible
conceptual framework. By such reports I mean those with credible multiple or
independent witnesses, instrumented observations, and physical evidence.
In this context the most crucial cases are not the most exotic or scary, but
those with which actual science can be accomplished—usually close
encounters of the second kind. In that sense, a single well-investigated landing-
trace case is worth a thousand intriguing but evidentially empty abduction
narratives.
I am also convinced that besides what might be called the “event
phenomenon,” there is an “experience phenomenon” which bears only a
superficial relationship to the former. We lack a good vocabulary for, or even
any real understanding of, a class of human experience—call it “visionary” for
want of a better word—in which ostensibly supernatural entities are
encountered. All we know is that such experiences are not objectively “real” in
any conventional sense of the term; they just seem that way, and vividly so, to
those who undergo them, and thus, since they are unlike ordinary
hallucinations, they are genuinely mysterious. They mirror the cultural
moment’s notion of what a “supernatural experience” might be; thus, today the
entities are extraterrestrials, whereas once they were fairies or demons or
angels.
It is entirely likely, in my opinion, that daylight disks tracked on radar and
exotic entity encounters experienced by individuals are two entirely separate,
unrelated classes of phenomena. The first involves an event (it can be
demonstrated that it happened in the world), and the second involves an
experience (which can never be conclusively shown to have happened in the
world).
I am in no way arguing for a paranormal hypothesis here. All I am saying is
that certain sorts of human experiences are only dimly understood, if that; and
that—where the UFO phenomenon is concerned—some of these contribute to
the noise around the signal, which may be the intrusion of somebody else’s
technology into our planetspace.
—JEROME CLARK
Clear Intent (Prentice-Hall, 1984). Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood

rely on 3,000 pages of previously classified documents, released under the
Freedom of Information Act by eight military and civilian intelligence
agencies, to construct a historical pattern of federal government involvement in
UFO investigations. They also provide the first American version of an incident
which occurred in 1980 at the Bentwaters Air Force Base in England involving
an alleged night landing by a UFO witnessed by numerous U.S. Air Force
security personnel.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Columbia Pictures, 1977; written and
directed by Steven Spielberg.) A trend-setting UFO classic, starring Richard
Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut, and Teri Garr.
More than a classic, Spielberg’s monumental film is an exuberant rendering
of contact with extraterrestrial visitors. It achieves an ingenious blend of
“human interest” and sense of wonder that few can match. As reviewer Paul
Clemens put it: “Close Encounters...is quite possibly the most important film
of our time. The most important because it encompasses all. The entire human
race, our planet, our universe...our destiny.”
In the story, the protagonist (Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss) is
confronted with the greatest mystery—culminating in the greatest imagined
event—of our time, during the course of his mundane duties as a power
company repairman. It turns out Neary’s quest (instilled telepathically, it seems,
by the aliens) proceeds in parallel with a secret group of scientific and military
types, who are also hot on the UFO trail.
The film represents perfectly the symbiotic relationship between alleged
science fact and science fiction. Spielberg even retained Dr. J. Allen Hynek
(whose coined phrase served as the movie’s title) as a technical advisor on the
film to authentic essential “facts” of UFO lore. Then, the film later had an
apparent effect on what kind of “real” UFO-aliens were reported.
It reshaped reports of short, big-headed aliens in two demonstrable ways: (1)
Before the film, aliens with long, thin necks were nonexistent. After it, they
became common. (2) Before the film, the eyes were of a generally human
arrangement of pupil, iris, and white. Afterwards, they generally became totally
black. The eyes tended to be more tilted and larger than before.
Though it may be impossible to prove, the “Spielberg effect” is as real as
any alien ever reported.
& RONALD D. STORY
References
Close Encounters of the Third Kind ’78 magazine (Warren Publishing, 1977).
Clute, John, and Nicholls, Peter. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s/Griffin, 1993; 1995).
Spielberg, Steven. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Dell Books, 1977).
Colony: Earth (Stein & Day, 1974). Richard Mooney proposes that humans
arrived on Earth as colonists escaping the wreckage of a greater culture
elsewhere in the galaxy. But another disaster befell this species in the form of
the flood described in the Bible. Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, and other
megalithic structures were built to protect the ruling classes from future
cataclysms and to determine the new orbital position of the planet and length of
the year once the flood waters receded.
Coming of the Saucers, The (privately published by Ray Palmer, 1952).
Pilot Kenneth Arnold, assisted by publisher Ray Palmer, recount Arnold’s 1947
UFO sighting, which made worldwide headlines. The book includes Palmer’s
subsequent investigation of other similar reports. Arnold had described the nine
bright objects he spotted while flying near Mount Rainier as fluttering in
formation, silver wings without fuselages, moving “like a saucer would if you
skipped it across the water.” Newspaper reporters took that statement and
turned it into “flying saucers,” creating a shape and an observational standard
against which all future UFO reports would be compared.
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the

Paranormal (CSICOP) CSICOP is a leading independent organization of
scientists and scholars formed in 1976 and active ever since in critically
examining paranormal and fringe-science claims (including those concerning
UFOs and alien contact) from a scientific point of view. It is based at the Center
for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, and has been headed since its inception by
founding chairman Paul Kurtz, professor emeritus of philosophy at the State
University of New York at Buffalo. CSICOP’s more general mission is to
promote science and scientific inquiry, critical thinking, science education, and
reason. It publishes the Skeptical Inquirer (subtitled “The Magazine for Science
and Reason”), a bimonthly journal that presents evaluative and investigative
articles and information and perspective on a wide range of topics. Authors
include scientists, scholars, and investigators worldwide; the need not be
associated with CSICOP. It also holds national and international conferences,
assists news media with finding scientific sources and scientifically credible
information, sponsors workshops on skepticism, puts out a quarterly printed
newsletter, disseminates electronic newsletters, and so on. CSICOP has been
strongly critical of those who fail to use scientific rigor in investigating claims
and of media that present credulous, unskeptical accounts of UFO claims and
other unproved assertions about alien contact. Many scientists, writers, and
investigators interested in extraterrestrial intelligence and active in examining
claims of UFOs and alien contact have been associated with the CSICOP over
the years, including astronomers Carl Sagan, George Abell, David Morrison,
Alan Hale, and Edwin Krupp, UFO investigators Philip J. Klass, Robert
Sheaffer, and James Oberg (Klass is chairman of CSICOP’s UFO
subcommittee), writers Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardner, and many physicists,
plus a number of psychologists and social scientists (among them Robert A.
Baker, Susan Blackmore, and Robert Bartholomew) interested in the
psychological and sociological aspects of these controversies. Robert Sheaffer
frequently critically comments on the most recent bizarre claims about aliens
and UFOs in his “Psychic Vibrations” Skeptical Inquirer column.
Noteworthy investigative articles published in SI over the years include
Klass’s series demonstrating that the Majestic-12 documents are probably hoax
documents, David E. Thomas’s reports on the actual, very earthly origin of the
1947 Roswell “crashed saucer” debris (a Project Mogul multiple-balloon
launch), and investigations into other claims and hoaxes surrounding Roswell.
Forty of these articles were collected recently in a book, The UFO Invasion
(Prometheus, 1997).
—KENDRICK FRAZIER
P.O. Box 703

Address: Amherst, NY 14226
U.S.A.
Web site: www.csicop.org
Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (The MIT Press, 1973)

edited by Carl Sagan. In 1971 more than fifty American and Russian scientists
and academicians met at a conference to debate the prospects for
communicating with other life in the universe. Numerous unconventional
theories for the evolution of intelligent life were offered: that life can exist at
the level of elementary particles; that life can exist on planetary systems
without suns; that comets could be a home for technological civilizations, and
so we should be aiming our radio telescopes at both comets and stars.
Communion (William Morrow, 1987). Horror fiction novelist Whitley Strieber

captapulted himself onto the top of the New York Times bestseller list with this
book describing how he used hypnosis to uncover memories of having been
abducted by aliens from childhood through adulthood.
According to Strieber abductions are connected to the number three and a
triangular shape, because the visitors often appear in threes wearing triangular
shapes or devices. He ends the book on a cautionary note: “I cannot say, in all
truth, that I am certain the visitors are present as entities entirely independent of
their observers.”
Communion Foundation The Communion Foundation was founded as a

private foundation by Whitley and Anne Strieber in 1988. It remains a private
foundation, supported only by contributions from the Striebers.
By 1997, with the surgical removal of unexplained objects from the bodies
of close encounter witnesses, innovations in memory research, and advances in
video recording technology it has become clear that science now has the tools
to make some clear determinations about the nature of both the close encounter
experience and UFOs.
The Foundation does not have any bias for or against the notion that contact
with a nonhuman intelligence may be under way. Its bias is toward objectivity
and its goal is to answer the questions correctly.
However, a powerful prejudice has evolved within the culture of science
against any research into this area at all. Without clear direction and a credible
source of funding, genuine scientific progress will be impossible. The
Foundation intends to work against this prejudice by educating scientists in the
fact that there is a serious problem to be solved, there are interesting and useful
discoveries to be made, and an obligation to replace public confusion with
objective knowledge.
MISSION STATEMENT
It is the mission of the Communion Foundation to provide funding to

established scientific institutions and credentialed professionals within the
scientific and academic communities to accomplish the following objectives:
1. To engage in research into brain function associated with memory, in order

to determine the degree to which specific memories refer to experiences
that the subject perceived as a physical event.
2. To carry out sequential studies of close encounter witnesses in order to
determine their profile within social and population groups.
3. To study the tens of thousands of witness narratives archived by the
foundation in the past ten years in order to construct a clear and correct
picture of the close encounter phenomenon. This is expected to be vastly
different from current preconceptions.
4. To engage in the removal and examination of unknown objects from the
bodies of close encounter witnesses and, if possible, a sample of subjects
displaying the presence of such objects but reporting no close encounter
memories.
5. To encourage and facilitate research into new propulsion technologies
intended to replace heat, chemical reaction and atomic propulsion in order
to provide mankind with an efficient means of expanding into the solar
system and the farther cosmos on as broad a scale as possible.
5928 Broadway
Address: San Antonio, TX 78209
U.S.A.
Web site: www.whitleysworld.com
Condon Study See UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO UFO PROJECT.

Confederation of Planets in Service to the Infinite Creator A term used
in classic channeled text, The RA Material (a.k.a. The Law of One series), as
well as other channeled sources, beginning with the 1950s contactees. The term
denotes an intergalactic collective of benevolently-oriented extraterrestrial
races (comparable to the “Ashtar Command”), which aids human evolution on
Earth, as the source for all “positively-oriented” ET contacts throughout the
ages. It can be assumed this group goes by many different names; but
regardless of name, it points to a unified association of ET races in our portion
of the galaxy, serving to assist the development of consciousness. Many
spiritually oriented teachers also believe that Earth will join this collective in
the near future.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Contactees Shortly after the influx of UFO sightings in the early 1950s came a
new phase of saucerism: the emergence of the “contactees.” Suddenly, it
seemed, the Space People who piloted the heretofore unidentified craft were
now introducing themselves to a select group of individuals, chosen, or self-
appointed, to spread the wisdom of the “Space Brothers” to all mankind.
The Space Brothers came from Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune,
“Clarion,” and even from the Earth in times gone by. The contactee stories were
deeply rooted in a strong religious tradition. More accurately, they were
mystical “New Agers” who embraced the “mystery” religions of the East
(especially Hinduism) as well as the Messianic traditions of the West. They
were also utopians.
The Space People were described as idealized humans from idyllic societies
whose message was one of love and peace. Obviously inspired by Cold War
tensions and the resulting paranoia, the contactees were the “chosen ones”
selected by the Space People to warn mankind of its folly.
Among UFOlogists, the contactees were seen as distinct from witnesses
merely reporting UFO occupants and UFO “kidnap” victims known as
“abductees.” The typical occupant report involved a chance encounter in which
the witness would just happen upon a landed craft and entities associated with
it. Although this is sometimes the claim made by contactees concerning their
initial encounter, once contact is made there is usually a long series of
continued encounters that are planned rather than accidental. Furthermore,
there are usually specially arranged meetings for instructional purposes. In
these meetings, the Space People benevolently impart their secret, cosmic
knowledge—and most importantly, “Cosmic Laws”—to the chosen ones. As
such they become initiates and assume their mission on Earth, which is to
promote cosmic awareness—sometimes by spearheading new religions.
In recent years “abductees” have begun to serve as messengers for the same
spiritual beliefs that were formerly associated with the contactees—hence
blurring a sharp distinction that once existed.
—RONALD D. STORY
Corrales, Scott (b. 1963). Scott Corrales is a writer and translator of UFO and
paranormal subjects dealing with Latin America and Spain. His work has
appeared in magazines in the U.S., U.K., Japan, Spain, and Italy. Corrales is
also the author of Chupacabras and Other Mysteries (Greenleaf, 1997),
Flashpoint: High Strangeness in Puerto Rico (Amarna, 1998) and Forbidden
Mexico (1999). He lives in Pennsylvania, where he edits Inexplicata: The
Journal of Hispanic Ufology.
P.O. Box 228,
Address: Derrick City, PA 16727
U.S.A.
E-mail: Lornis1@juno.com
Web Site: www.inexplicata.com
POSITION STATEMENT: The UFO phenomenon is undoubtedly real and

represents one of humanity’s greatest concerns, yet one that it has steadily
chosen to ignore over the years, largely out of complacency.
In my opinion, the UFO phenomenon is interdimensional in origin, with
“interdimensional” being understood as another level or plane of existence
coequal to our own that serves as the home base of the UFO phenomenon and
perhaps many others.
Whether the UFO and its attendant phenomena manifest in our own reality
by chance or design cannot be ascertained, but the sheer number of sightings
and encounters with nonhuman entities leads me to think that their visits have
always been deliberate.
Curiously enough, humanity has always been in contact with these entities,
which appear under a number of names and identities, but has only recently
come to identify them as “UFO occupants,” “aliens,” “ultraterrestrials,” etc.
General awareness of this fact would perhaps serve to heal the breach
between the spiritual and the physical that has always existed in Western
society, particularly since the rise of Scientism.
—SCOTT CORRALES
Cosmic Consciousness This term was coined by the Canadian psychiatrist

Richard Maurice Bucke, in 1899, to denote a higher level of spiritual
awareness. “The prime characteristic of Cosmic Consciousness is, as its name
implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the
universe,” Bucke wrote. “In the evolution of the human mind simple
consciousness was first produced; then self-consciousness; and lastly…Cosmic
Consciousness.” (Bucke, 1901)
This theoretical model of human awareness emphasizes those changes in
human consciousness that occur as a result of UFO encounters, and the
personal and social transformations that develop around the meaning and
significance of UFO experiences. This model also contains the minor
hypothesis that UFO investigators are themselves UFO contactees.
This model is based on the work of Teilhard de Chardin, Julian Huxley, and
the emerging theories of a holigraphic universe. (Ferguson, 1977; Wilbur,
1982)
Ferguson quotes Ilya Prigogine with regard to social and cultural
transformations: “Cultures are ‘perhaps the most coherent and strangest of
dissipative structures.’ Some innovations succeed, but others are suppressed by
the surrounding ‘medium,’ the dominant society. A critical number of advocates
of change can create a ‘preferential direction’ like the ordering of a crystal or a
magnet organizes the whole.” (Ferguson, 1979)
Prigogine’s theory of cultural transformations may provide theoretical
support for empirical evidence which has been obtained for the hypothesis of
the “1% Effect”: 1 percent of persons in society, practicing daily meditation,
can significantly lower levels of crime, sickness, accident rates, etc.; they can
significantly increase the conditions for an ideal society (Zimmerman, 1979);
and they can reduce significantly the crime rates in an urban area. (Arons and
Arons, 1981)
The UFO experience may be hypothesized as a program to increase the level
of awareness and spiritual knowledge through the individual contactee. For
example: A French physician, Dr. “X” experienced “healing” as a result of his
UFO observation. (Michel, 1979) A 73-year-old Argentine gaucho, Ventura
Maceiras, suddenly gained more philosophical and scientific knowledge after
his UFO experience. (Romaniuk, 1973) A young woman, Betty Andreasson,
with a fundamentalist religious faith, encountered humanoids whose food is
“knowledge tried by fire.” (Fowler, 1979)
Each of these UFO-related experiences seemed to be based on the views of
reality that were held by the observer/experiencer, but each of these experiences
apparently extended their views of reality, as well. In a holographic universe, a
sophisticated observer can obtain many views of each hologram, and yet each
“space-time” event contains all of the elements of the larger order of reality.
So, each UFO experience can be hypothesized as a separate “space-time”
display, and yet each UFO display can be viewed as a “lens” that allows the
observer to gain a larger display: a glimpse of the universe, or Cosmic
Consciousness Conditioning. (Sprinkle, 1976a)
UFO CONTACTEE EXPERIENCES
In the opinion of the writer, the asinine, bizarre, and crazy aspects of
UFO/alien activity can be hypothesized as the ABC’s of a Cosmic
Consciousness Conditioning (CCC) program: to change humans from Planetary
Persons to Cosmic Citizens.
This CCC hypothesis may be wrong; certainly it is difficult to test. However,
it is appropriate to explore, because many UFO contactees claim that it is the
basis for their experiences and for the direction of their lives. So, we can learn
something about the psychology and the sociology of UFO experiences, even if
the claims of UFO contactees cannot be substantiated by current traditional
scientific investigations.
Since 1980, a group of interested persons in Laramie, Wyoming, have
conducted the Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation. The main
purpose of the “Contactee Conference,” as it is also called, is to provide a
forum for private and/or public presentations by UFO contactees and UFO
investigators, so they can become acquainted and share information.
UFO contactees and UFO investigators are often suspicious of one another,
in the same way that “mystics” and “skeptics” are often suspicious of one
another and drawn together by their mutual need for one another! Some of us
who participate in the Contactee Conference view ourselves as both UFO
investigators and UFO contactees.
We are willing to discuss our UFO experiences as well as our investigations.
The writer views himself as biased in at least two ways: (1) As a “contactee,”
who has described his UFO encounters of 1949 and 1956, and his 1980
recollection (or fantasy or impression) of a fifth grade experience on board a
space craft, with a tall man who said: “Leo, learn to read and write well; when
you grow up, you can help other people learn more about their purpose in life.”
(2) As a UFO investigator who has talked with hundreds of UFO witnesses,
read thousands of reports, and spent many hours discussing various aspects of
UFO experiences with other investigators and contactees, including hypnotic
sessions with more than 500 UFO abductees. These biases, or course, influence
the writer—positively and negatively—in his UFO investigations. However,
these biases do not negate the UFO contactee phenomenon.
As reported in the 1981 Proceedings of the Rocky Mountain Conference on
UFO Investigation, the writer has worked with many persons who describe in
hypnotic sessions their memories or impressions of abductions by UFO
occupants or “UFOLKS.”
These persons often express the fear of being crazy, or being ridiculed by
relatives, friends, or neighbors. But they usually express relief upon learning
that other participants have reported similar events: strange dreams,
physiological symptoms such as bodily marks, poltergeist activity, apparitions,
electromagnetic anomalies, and “mental messages” from entities who claim to
come from outer space.
Of course, many investigators express doubts about the use of hypnotic
procedures for the evaluation_of UFO experiences (e.g., Hendry, 1979;
Lawson, 1976). However, the exploration of “loss of time” experiences, or
amnesic periods during UFO sightings, can be enhanced. Later, perhaps, other
evidence can be obtained which can be used to support, or refute, the
information obtained in hypnotic sessions.
Since 1976, the writer has been conducting a“Survey of Psychic Impressions
of UFO Phenomena.” (Sprinkle, 1976b) Over 600 participants have completed
a questionnaire.
The majority of these persons present profiles of “normal” responses to
psychological inventories, and yet they are puzzled by their UFO experiences
and related changes in their lives. Many of these Persons (e.g., Fisher, (1981);
Kannenberg, (1979); and McNames, 1981) have described their claims of
verbal messages or mental communications which offer information about the
purposes of UFO personalities.
What follows is a summary of these claims about UFO experiences and
related conditions:
1. UFO contactees have been chosen; no UFO contact is accidental.
2. Contactees are ordinary people, who exhibit a caring or a loving concern
for all humankind.
3. Contactees have an experience which can be viewed as a manifestation of
their ideas of reality. 4. UFO experiences include paraphysical,
parapsychological, and spiritual manifestations which are designed to influence
the “world view” of contactees.
5. Contactees receive information during, and after, their UFO experiences
that is related to their life interests (e.g., natural sciences social sciences, music
and art, ancient civilizations, psychic phenomena, reincarnation, metaphysical
and spiritual knowledge, etc.).
6. Contactees are gently coerced into studies and activities which blend with
the ultimate purpose of UFO entities; they are not forced to be obedient to
UFOLKS.
7. Contacts are initiated and maintained within the general framework of the
contactees’ views of reality. (Thus, UFO contacts can be viewed as physical,
face-to-face encounters with flesh and blood beings, or out-of-body
experiences, or mental programming by UFOLKS; or UFO contacts can be
viewed as dreams, fantasies, and/or subconscious ideas which are manifested
consciously, without external stimulus.)
8. Contactees are programmed for a variety of “future” activities, including
awareness of their own contacts and desire to share their messages and
knowledge with other contactees.
9. The lives of contactees move in the direction of greater self-awareness,
greater concern for the welfare of the planet Earth, and a greater sense of
Cosmic Citizenship with other beings in the universe.
10. The personal metamorphosis of UFO contactees is the forerunner of a
social transformation in human consciousness, which now is leading to changes
in the economic, educational, military, political, and religious institutions of
nations of the Earth: the “New Age” of true science and spirituality
EXAMPLE OF A UFO CONTACTEE EXPERIENCE
Ann (Canary) Brooke (a.k.a. “Gloria Archer”) experienced some strange

events, which for many long years caused her much distress. She is a bright,
attractive, and perceptive person; however, she was raised in a family that
valued family unity, nationalism, traditional views of “common sense” reality,
and Christian fundamentalist beliefs.
She was unable to talk with her family about her UFO experience, which
included: the out-of-the body experience; near-death experience; abduction;
bodily and sexual examination; and mental communication with UFO entities.
Results of psychological inventories were in the normal range. Hypnotic
suggestions to recall and relive her UFO experiences were helpful to her in
recognizing that she had experienced direct contact with alien beings. Ann
Brooke described the effects of her UFO experience as follows:
After my experience I knew that I had been privileged with a glimpse at
something infinitely wondrous and profound. My inner consciousness had
undergone a complete and staggering metamorphosis. Those truths I had
been taught through the years by my church, family, parents, and teachers
no longer were valid to me.
Those beliefs had been replaced by an understanding of the process we
call creation and I know our Earth science and education were not yet
beginning to suspect the Universal Laws that govern the creation of worlds
within our universe. The following is a synopsis of the changes brought
about in the inner me as a direct consequence of my experience:
1. I have embraced a faith of cosmic conditions. I know the Creator as
sexless and all creation as a material manifestation of mind extended into
matter.
2. I no longer have allegiance to any particular form of earthly
government, political system, race, economic or social structure My only
allegiance is to my Creator and to the Cosmic Christ.
3. I have continued to be obsessed with an expanded desire for truth and
understanding of Earth’s and man’s evolutionary progress
4. I have studied the mind and altered states of consciousness.
5. I am a firm believer in reincarnation. All of us are immortal souls—
and we are responsible for what our minds manifest around us.
6. I have strived to balance myself: to evolve physically, mentally, and
spiritually into a balanced human being.
7. I have tried to live my principles and moral laws within myself. Man
is his own ultimate judge and therefore metes out his own punishment.
8. I have vowed to serve the Universal Law. I try to live and feel the law
of love for others.
9. All life is one.
We are part of the stars, oceans, all creation.
10. I have no fear of death. Death is the laying aside of one’s physical
body. Life is eternal—mind is eternal.
11. My mission is to Earth’s citizens and environment; unless the
consciousness of humankind is raised, we will ultimately destroy the work
of eons, ourselves, and the present environment of our world.
12. Man is facing a crucial period in his evolution as a species.
13. I believe in a Father-Mother God, a balanced interchange between
the creativity of both sexes.
14. I have the knowledge that we are unknowing participants in a living
universe. There are other life forms, other worlds, other dimensions.
15. I am experiencing loss of interest in the accumulation of material
things.
16. Basically I have become a pacifist. War depletes—it does not enrich.
17. I have the knowledge that the world’s fuel must be water. I feel a
total disagreement with any society that pushes the use of nuclear fuel or
weapons.
18. Within myself, I experience the consummation of science with
religion.
After many years, I now realize and know that my own transformation
was not and is not a single experience here on Earth. There are literally
hundreds if not thousands of people who are or have experienced this
metamorphosis. Our numbers are growing yearly and we are beginning to
locate and communicate with each other.
An alien invasion has already occurred on Earth. The conquering power
is not military or technological and economic superiority. It is a revolution
in consciousness, and spiritual knowing that has been implanted within the
minds of thousands of people all over the world.
The future of this world is passing into the hands and minds of these
people. Those of us who have been contacted no longer serve the old
orders. We fear nothing—least of all the threat of death or physical
deprivation. We are here—now!
We walk among you daily—we pass you on the streets, stand next to you
in the elevators, and you see little of what is moving daily closer to
completion. We are among you—and our force is the force of mind
governed by a morality and an ethical code that upon Earth is
incomprehensible. (Archer, 1979)
“HIDDEN” UFO CONTACTEE EXPERIENCES
If these messages to UFO contactees are accurate, and if these messages are
reported accurately, then the “alien invasion” has already occurred—and not as
a conquering power, but as a revolution in consciousness.
In other words, UFO activity could be viewed as a lesson plan, or an
educational project, to transform us Earthlings into UFO observers, witnesses,
and contactees: to change us Earthlings from Planetary Persons into Cosmic
Citizens!
Then the scenario follows along these lines: the next generation of scientists
can build space-time craft, or “flying saucers,” and Earth pilots can fly out in
UFOs as UFO occupants, providing scientific and spiritual knowledge, or
cosmic citizenship, to other planetary persons, etc.
THE NEW AGE
In support of the theme that a “new age” is dawning, three examples are
summarized: (1) the effects on crime by groups of meditators; (2) the
“hundredth monkey phenomenon”; and (3) the hypothesis of formative
causation:
1. Arons and Arons presented a paper at the American Psychological
Association meeting, in 1981, that demonstrated differences in police records
for number of arrests in specified areas of Atlanta, Georgia, during those time
periods when groups of meditators were meditating in those areas. The authors
concluded that the data support the hypothesis that there are conditions under
which small numbers of meditating individuals (at least if they are practicing
the Transcendental Meditation technique) can create harmonious influences in a
large social system, without face-to-face contact.
2. Lyall Watson, an English biologist, surveys biological foundations for
unconscious behavior, including the delightful story of the “hundredth
monkey.” Watson described Imo, a female monkey, who learned to wash sand
from sweet potatoes, which were provided by Japanese scientists who were
observing monkeys on the island of Koshima. Imo taught her mother to wash
her food; young monkeys were teaching their elders to wash their food; then,
one day, an extraordinary event occurred, after an unspecified number of
monkeys (about 100) had learned to wash their food, by nightfall of that day
almost all of the monkeys were washing their food! Even more unusual,
according to the unpublished notes of several scientists, other colonies of
monkeys on other islands and on the mainland at Takasakiyama
“spontaneously” began washing their food! (Watson, 1979)
3. Rupert Sheldrake, an English biologist, has suggested that the hypothesis
of “formative causation” can account for some changes in evolutionary
development. (Sheldrake, 1981) The concept of “morphic reasonance” is used
as a basis for observed changes in organisms that grow and evolve in unusual
increments. For example, Sheldrake described the long range studies by
McDougall and his associates. The results support the hypothesis that when
groups of rats in one location learn to negotiate a particular maze, then other
groups of rats in other locations learn to negotiate a similar maze in fewer
trials.
These examples support the view that new learning can occur through
“psychic” channels as well as “physical” channels of cause and effect.
CONCLUSIONS
With this short survey of some references to “new” learning, what can we
conclude about the New Age? we cannot conclude, necessarily, that any Earth
changes will result in the total destruction of the Earth. On the other hand, the
number of prophecies about change would suggest that external and/or internal
forces are impelling humankind toward another level of physical, biological,
psychosocial, and spiritual awareness.
What we can conclude is that there is increasing evidence to support the
hypothesis that a shift is occurring: a shift in thinking, or a change in human
awareness, from a mechanistic model of the universe to a holographic model of
the universe; to both “hardware” and “software”; science and spirituality.
Furthermore, we can predict that this shift in awareness will continue at an
ever increasing pace, especially if groups of people come together to share their
own experiences and their new learning. If these networks of concerned
persons continue to grow, then education will become more public and more
psychic in form and in process.
This writer has presented a view of human consciousness as a theoretical
model for explaining UFO activity. The model suggests that UFO experiences
are educational events that are presented to UFO observers, who become
witnesses, who become contactees, who are impelled to learn more about the
“outer” world and “inner” world, to share knowledge, and to become advocates
for transformation in human awareness.
If this hypothetical model of UFO activity has relevance, then UFO
investigators can expect an increased number of reports of UFOs as physical
craft and as psychic phenomena and increased awareness of messages being
received by UFO contactees. If the messages are meaningful, then personal
consciousness is changing and social institutions are changing.
The major question remains a puzzle: Is UFO activity leading to the
awareness, acceptance, and acknowledgment of the peaceful presence of alien
intelligence? Or is UFO activity leading to the awareness, acceptance, and
acknowledgment of “US FOLKS” as “UFOLKS” of the future?
This model suggests that a possible explanation for one facet of the UFO
puzzle is that we UFO investigators also are UFO contactees, and that our
investigations are a small part of a huge operation: a plan by which human
consciousness is being transformed from that of Planetary Persons to Cosmic
Citizens.
—R. LEO SPRINKLE
References
Archer, G. Personal communication, June 9, 1979.
Arons, A. and Arons, E. N. “Experimental Interventions of High Coherence Groups into Disorderly Social
Systems” American Psychological Association Symposium, Los Angeles, August 27, 1982.
Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness (Innes & Sons, 1901; E. P. Dutton, 1969).
Ferguson, Marilyn. Brain/Mind Bullein Special Issue:
“A New Perspective of Reality” (July 4, 1977).
________. Brain/Mind Bullein Special Issue: “Prigogine’s Science of Becoming” (May 21, 1979).
________. The Aquarian Conspiracy (J. P. Tarcher, 1980).
Fisher, C. Personal communications, May 27, 1968 - March 16, 1981.
Haines, Richard F. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (Scarecrow Press, 1979).
Hendry, Allan. The UFO Handbook (Doubleday, 1979).
Huxley, Julian. Evolution in Action (Mentor/NAL, 1953).
Kannenberg, Ida. Personal communication, April 27, 1979.
________. “The Great Contactee Hoax,” Proceedings, Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation,
Laramie, Wyoming, May 1981.
Lawson, A. H. “Hypnotic Regression of Alleged CE-III Cases,” Flying Saucer Review (October 1976).
McNames, L. Personal communications, April 2, 1973 -March 17, 1981.
Michel, A. “The Strange Case of Dr. ‘X’,” Flying Saucer Review (August 1979).
Romaniuk, P. “Rejuvenation Follows Close Encounter with UFO,” Flying Saucer Review (July-August
1973).
Sheldrake, Rupert. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (Tarcher, 1981).
Sprinkle, R. Leo. “A Preliminary Report on the Investigation of an Alleged UFO Occupant Encounter,”
Flying Saucer Review (November 1976).
________. “UFO Activity: Cosmic Consciousness Conditioning?” UPIAR (Editecs, 1976).
________. “Hypnotic and Psychic Implications in the Investigation of UFO Reports” in Lorenzen, Coral
and James. Encounters with UFO Occupants (Berkley/NAL, 1976).
________. “Using the Pendulum Technique in the Investigation of UFO Experiences” in UFO
Phenomena: International Annual Review (Editecs, 1978).
________. ed. Proceedings of Rocky Mountain Conference on UFO Investigation, Laramie, Wyoming,
May 1980; May 1981.
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man (Editions du Seuil, 1955; Harper & Row, 1959).
Watson, Lyall. Lifetide: The Biology of the Unconscious (Simon & Schuster, 1979). Wilbur, K. The
Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes: Exploring the Leading Edge of Science (Shambala,
1982).
Zimmerman, W. J. “Improved Quality of Life During the Rhode Island Ideal Society Campaign, Phase I,
June 12, 1979 to September 12, 1979” (Global Research Program, May 1979).
cosmonauts, UFO sightings by Unlike their American colleagues, Russian

cosmonauts speak openly about their UFO sightings. Several of them were
interviewed by western UFO researchers Michael Hesemann from Germany
and Giorgio Bongiovanni from Italy.
Even the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was quoted by the Russian press
as saying: “UFOs are a reality. They fly with incredible speeds and, if one will
give me permission to do so, I will gladly tell you what I saw while in orbit
around the Earth.” His colleague, Kosmonaut E.V. Khrunov, stated in the
March 3, 1979, issue of the magazine Technique and Youth: “The UFO problem
exists and is very serious. Thousands of people have seen UFOs, but it is not
clear what they are…. It is quite possible that behind this question the problem
of communication with an extraterrestrial civilization is hidden.”
In 1978, Cosmonaut and Air Force General Pavel Romanovich Popovich
had a sighting of a “white triangle” on a flight from Washington D.C. to
Moscow at an altitude of 31,000 feet. It flew faster than the aircraft, going
about 1000 miles per hour.
On May 5, 1981, at about 6 P.M., Cosmonaut and Air Force General Vladimir
Kovalyonok had a remarkable sighting in space, aboard the Salyut 6. When
his space capsule passed Africa in the direction of the Indian Ocean, he saw
through the porthole an object, which he described as “disk shaped, one half of
it surrounded by a conical kind of fog.” It flew aside the Salyut, rotating in
flight direction. Then, suddenly, it seemed to explode in a golden light. About
two seconds later, a second explosion happened, and two spheres appeared,
“two globes of the same color, golden, beautiful,” as Kovalyonok described
them. They seemed to be connected by a kind of “white smoke.” A few minutes
later, the spaceship entered the Earth’s shadow, and the object was not visible
anymore. The cosmonaut is convinced that it was under intelligent control.
On September 28, 1990, at 10:50 P.M., MIR Cosmonauts Gennadij Manakov
and Gennadij Strekhalov saw “a big, iridescent silvery sphere…hovering above
the Earth” after the Soviet Space Station had passed Newfoundland. After six
or seven seconds, he stated, it disappeared.
In March 1991, MIR cosmonaut Musa Manarov, when observing the
approach of a space capsule, saw and filmed a cigar shaped object, surrounded
by a rotating light, in some distance for several minutes. The film was released
to the German researcher Michael Hesemann and published as part of his video
collection “UFOs: The Footage Archives.”
More video films, taken by the MIR crews, were released in 1999 to the
Italian researcher Giorgio Bongiovanni. Although the Cosmonauts of these
missions were not yet interviewed, the footage confirms further sightings by
MIR cosmonauts Vladislav Volkov and Sergei Krikaliov in August 1991 and by
MIR Cosmonauts Vladimir Soloviov and Nikolai Budarin on November 18,
1995.
—MICHAEL HESEMANN
Cowichan (Canada) encounter One morning Mrs. Doreen Kendall, a

practical nurse at the Cowichan District Hospital, British Columbia, Canada,
reportedly saw through a hospital window a circular UFO with a transparent
dome hovering outside about forty feet away. She claims to have seen two
figures inside the dome, operating levers. Although Mrs. Kendall was the sole
witness of the occupants, several other nurses are said to have seen the UFO
leave.
The following condensed account gives the essential details of the January
5, 1970, sighting:
Mrs. Kendall, a registered nurse, lived in Nanaimo and commuted to work at
the Cowichan District Hospital. At midnight on New Year’s Eve, both she and
Mrs. Frieda Wilson began the midnight to 8 A.M. shift on the second floor (east
wing) of the hospital. At 5 A.M., they went into a four-bed ward to begin
morning care. Nurse Wilson attended the patient whose bed was by the door,
and Nurse Kendall attended the patient in the next bed, which was located next
to the window.
At this point, Nurse Kendall pulled the drapes open as is frequently done at
that time in the morning. She stood looking out while nurse Wilson continued
with her duties. What Doreen Kendall claims she saw is described as follows:
A “saucer,” resembling a sphere, around which was a circular airfoil with
lights on the rim, was hovering about sixty feet off the ground over a small
patio. She estimated it to be about fifty feet in diameter, and that it was
hovering at about the level of the third or children’s floor, at about sixty feet
from the hospital wall. When first seen, it was tilted toward her position, so that
she could see inside of the upper portion, which she felt was illumined from
below rather than above. The top portion was transparent and the light on the
bottom (which she saw later) was red.
Inside the transparent “bubble” or “cupola,” she claimed to observe two
human-appearing entities. At first, they were visible from the side and only
from the waist up, but when the object tipped toward the hospital she saw their
complete forms. Both were standing, one apparently behind the other, and each
stood in front of a stool with a back on it. The occupant farthest to her right was
facing what appeared to be a chrome instrument panel comprised of large and
small “circles” (possibly dials), which were brilliantly lit. She felt that both of
the “men” were over six feet tall and noted that they were both well built
As the object hovered, the man on Mrs. Kendall’s left turned toward her,
then extended his hand and touched the back of the man near the instrument
panel, who reached down and grabbed a rodlike device with a ball on the top
extremity, which protruded from the floor. She compared the latter to the joy
stick of an airplane. The man moved the “stick” up, then down, at which time
the disk tilted toward her, and she obtained a good view of the interior,
including the men.
The scene of the UFO encounter as described by Doreen Kendall (Artist: Brian James)
She said that the hand of the man, who apparently alerted the other to her
presence, was flesh-colored and human-appearing. Both wore dark clothing,
and their features were concealed by some kind of headgear. The latter seemed
to be similar to the material of the rest of their clothing.
Up until this time, Nurse Kendall had been so entranced with what she was
watching that she did not think to call anyone, but when the object began to
move away, she realized no one would believe her, so she called to Nurse
Wilson, who reportedly went to the window, and saw the strange object just
outside. She said, “What on earth is that?” to which Mrs. Kendall replied: “I
guess it’s a flying saucer.”
The couple then dashed quickly to the nurse’s station, down the hall, and
told what they had seen. They were not believed at first, but eventually two
nurses, followed shortly by a third, came into the ward where they watched the
lights of the disk-shaped craft. It was some distance away by then, but the lights
were clearly seen by all. One of the nurses ran down the corridor to a bathroom
and watched the object circle five or six times after which it took off “like a
streak” to the northeast.
Detail of UFO occupants as described by Doreen Kendall (Artist: Brian James)
Mrs. Kendall later said that she had not been afraid, but just was very
curious. She had the impression that the disk was having mechanical trouble.
Reference
Lorenzen, Coral and Jim. Encounters with UFO Occupants (Berkley, 1976).
Coyne (Mansfield, Ohio) helicopter case On October 18, 1973, the four-
man crew of an Army Reserve UH-1 helicopter, based in Cleveland, Ohio, flew
to Columbus, Ohio, for regularly scheduled physical exams. When finished,
they left the medical facility at approminately 10:00 P.M., drove back to the
airport (a distance of two miles), filed a flight plan, and took off for the return
to Cleveland at approximately 10:30.
The night was clear, calm, starry, and moonless; the temperature was 43
degrees F., visibility 15 miles. The route was familiar and the men were
relaxed.
The aircraft was commanded by Capt. Lawrence J. Coyne, 36, full-time
commander of the 316th Medivac Unit of the U.S. Army Reserve. Coyne was
rated for helicopter, seaplane, and fixed-wing aircraft. The co-pilot was Lt.
Arrigo Jezzi, 26, rated for helicopter flying only. Sgt. John Healey, 35, a
detective in the Intelligence Unit of the Cleveland Police Department, was the
flight medic. Spec. 5 Robert Yanacek, 23, was the crew chief. He had seen
active duty in Vietnam as a helicopter crew chief.
Jezzi was flying from the left-hand seat. The helicopter was cruising at 90
kts. at an altitude of 2500 feet above sea level over mixed woods, farmland, and
rolling hills averaging 1100 to 2300 feet elevation.
Near Mansfield, Ohio, Healey, in the left rear seat, saw a single red light off
to the left (west) heading south. It seemed brighter than a port wing light of a
normal aircraft, but because it was not relevent traffic, he did not mention it.
Approximately three to four minutes later, Yanacek, in the right rear seat,
noticed a single steady red light on the eastern horizon. It appeared to be pacing
the helicopter. After watching it for perhaps a minute, he reported it to Coyne,
who instructed him to “keep an eye on it.”
After about another 30 seconds, Yanacek announced that the light appeared
to be closing on their craft. Coyne and Yanacek watched from their seats. Healy
got up and stooped in the aisle to observe. Jezzi’s view was obstructed.
The light continued its approach. Coyne grabbed the controls from Jezzi,
began a powered descent of approximately 500 feet per minute, and contacted
Mansfield control tower, requesting information on possible jet traffic. After
initial radio contact, the radios malfunctioned on both UHF and VHF.
The red light increased in intensity and appeared to be on a collision course
at a speed estimated to be 600+ kts. Coyne increased the rate of descent to 2000
f.p.m. The last altitude he noted was 1700 feet msl.
As a collision appeared imminent, the light decelerated and assumed a
hovering relationship above and in front of the helicopter. Coyne, Healy, and
Yanacek reported that a cigar-shaped gray metallic object filled the entire front
windshield. A red light was at the nose, a white light at the tail, and a
distinctive green beam emanated from the lower part of the object. The green
beam swung up over the helicopter nose, through the main windshield, and into
the upper tinted window panels, bathing the cockpit in green light. Jezzi
reported only a white light from the upper windows. No noise or turbulence
from the object was noted.
After a few seconds of hovering, the object accelerated and moved off to the
west, showing only the white tail light. Coyne and Healey reported that the
object made a decisive 45-degree course change to the right. Jezzi did not
observe the course change. Yanacek’s view was partially obscured.
While the object was still visible, Jezzi and Coyne noted that the altimeter
read 3500 feet with a rate of climb of 1000 f.P.M. Coyne stated that the
collective was still in the full down position from his evasive descent. The
magnetic compass appeared to be malfunctioning.
Coyne gingerly raised the collective. The helicopter climbed nearly another
300 feet before positive control was regained. Then the crew felt a slight
“bump.” Coyne descended to the previously assigned altitude of 2500 feet,
radio contact with Akron/Canton airport was easily achieved, and the flight
continued to Cleveland without further incident.
THE GROUND WITNESSES
Mrs. Erma C. and four adolescents were driving south from Mansfield to
their rural home on October 18, 1973 at about 11:00 p.m. when they noticed a
single steady bright red light, flying south. This observation lasted about thirty
seconds. Approimately five minutes later they had turned east on Route 430
when they noticed two bright lights—red and green—descending rapidly from
the east. They then became aware of the “beating sound, a lot of racket” from
an approaching helicopter. Mrs. C. pulled over and parked. Two of the children,
both aged 13, jumped from the car. They witnessed an unknown object “about
the size of a blimp (or) a school bus” approaching from the east, and the
helicopter approaching from the south-west. The unknown object assumed a
hovering position over the helicopter and maintained this position as both
aircraft, at very low altitude, crossed the road behind the auto. An intense green
beam flared from the object, enveloping the helicopter and the environment.
“The woods, the car, everything turned green,” the ground witnesses reported.
As the helicopter continued toward the northeast, the hovering object was in
retrograde motion, which was corroborated by the ground witnesses who
reported it as a “zig-zag.” The crew was of course oblivious to this component
of the object’s flight path.
Eyewitness sketch by National Guard helicopter pilot Larry Coyne
The ground witnesses then observed the helicopter and object separate and
the object proceed to the northwest, exhibiting only a white “tail” light, while
the helicopter continued off to the northeast.
A second set of ground witnesses was found in 1988. On October 18, 1973,
Mrs. Jeanne Elias was in bed watching the 11:00 P.M. news when she heard the
sound of a helicopter, unusually low and very near the house. The residence is
south-east of Mansfield, less than six miles from the Mansfield runway and
1.75 miles from the C. family’s position. Jeanne was used to close aircraft
activity, but this time felt there was definite threat of a crash, and (she realized
rather foolishly) hid her head under the pillow. Her son John, 14, called to her
from his room. He reported that the helicopter noise had awakened him and he
had observed a bright green light “coming so heavy into my room.” Neither
Elias visually witnessed helicopter or object.
The eleven witnesses (4 crew, 5 C. family, 2 Elias’) were interviewed on
location, repeatedly, separately and at length. All reported that the object
appeared solid, with no diffuse areas, no train or trail, no fuzzy outlines. It had
precisely positioned lights (including a ‘maneuverable’ spotlight), which bore
no relationship to standard FAA aircraft lighting requirements. It made decisive
hard-angle turns. It may have affected the helicopter controls and instruments.
Scrupulous analysis of the individual increments of the event indicate that the
object was in continuous view for a minumum of 300 seconds.
The identity of the object remains unknown. Clearly, with a duration of at
least five minutes, it could not have been a meteor.
—JENNIE ZEIDMAN
Crash at Corona (Marlowe, 1992). Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner try to
make a case that two separate extraterrestrial spacecraft crashed in New Mexico
during 1947—one outside Roswell, the other 150 miles to the west. With this
book they became the first authors to speculate that the military retrieval of this
spacecraft debris produced technological spinoffs for human science, including
solid-state electronics, an idea latched onto and made into a bestseller five
years later by retired Army Colonel Philip Corso.
CUFOS See J. ALLEN HYNEK CENTER FOR UFO STUDIES.
crop circles In August l980 near Westbury, Wiltshire, some roughly swirled
circular patterns were found in fields of oats. This was in an area famous for
UFO activity in the l960s—where the “Warminster Thing” had been reported.
The marks were studied by the Bristol UFO group, Probe (headed by Ian
Mrzyglod), because of tales that they were UFO “landing sites.” Probe
consulted with a local physicist, Dr Terence Meaden, who convinced them that
the patterns were the result of fair weather whirlwinds—a mild form of
tornado. Although Britain has few destructive tornadoes, it has more wind
vortices of this modest type per square mile than any other country on Earth.
Meaden operates TORRO (the Tornado and Storm Research Organisation) and
regularly advises on the sites of damage-sensitive projects such as power
stations.
During the next few summers several more circles appeared—apparently
consistent with this weather theory. Then, engineer and UFO enthusiast, Pat
Delgado, discovered the phenomenon and alerted the media. By l983 he, later
with Colin Andrews, had ensured that the stranger possibilities for circles were
very much in the public perception, via articles for Flying Saucer Review and
press interviews.
The l983 circles came in a new complex form—several linked together in a
geometric pattern. However, one was soon exposed to be a hoax by Mrzyglod,
now working with BUFORA (British UFO Research Association). A national
newspaper had tried to trap other media sources by paying a farmer to fake the
“quintuplet” pattern.
Faced with this challenge, Meaden attempted to modify his theory to involve
electrified forces and multiple tornado funnels. This was possibly a step too far.
Circle patterns got even more complicated and turned into “pictograms” that
were of obviously intelligent origin. Alongside this escalation and the rising
level of media attention—at first in the U.K. and then globally—a crop circle
research community of several thousand people rapidly sprang up. Although
more modest in size these days this community still exists.
In l986, BUFORA published the first-ever book on the subject, Mystery of
the Circles, compiled by its Director of Investigations, Jenny Randles, and a
Hampshire statistician, Paul Fuller. They reported the work of Mrzyglod (who
quit UFOlogy in disgust at the lack of common sense), Meaden, and theories of
Delgado and Andrews.
The conclusion was that circles were a combination of hoaxing and weather
effects. The report was issued to the serious media, and led to outrage in certain
quarters of the UFO community who thought BUFORA were destructive
skeptics. A public seminar was arranged by BUFORA in London at which—for
the only time ever—all the key players in the story got together and had their
say. A vote at the end by the audience overwhelmingly endorsed the BUFORA
verdict.
Undeterred, and with the circles becoming ever more “unnatural” in
appearance (including by l990 images of whales and spiders), Delgado and
Andrews signed a major book deal. Circular Evidence— packed with
spectacular aerial color photos—became a global bestseller, attracted huge
media attention, and established the circle mystery for all time.
Delgado and Andrews claimed that the circles were most likely the result of
unknown energies—although the circle community was speculating much
further. Talk of alien messages, cries to prevent the destruction of our planet,
and more esoteric tales were soon incorporated.
BUFORA fought back with a more indepth look, Controversy of the Circles
(1989), again by Fuller and Randles, arguing in detail for the twin theory of
hoaxing and wind vortices. They now had gathered a number of eye-witness
accounts, where circles had been seen to be formed by what looked like the
wind. However, their case was little heeded. In l990 the BUFORA researchers
greatly expanded their work as Crop Circles: A Mystery Solved?. This work
emphasized the greater level of hoaxing, predicted that the hoaxers would
create patterns of a sort that could not be windproduced, and also reported on
research by Japanese scientists. This had established that the electrified vortex,
proposed by Meaden, could be artificially generated in a laboratory and did
leave simple circular aftereffects. These were also found in disused
underground railway tunnels, where the combination of wind and electric fields
provoked similar conditions. The BUFORA team also proposed that some
UFOs might, in fact, be visible electrified vortices.
In September l991, two retired artists, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley,
approached a national newspaper claiming responsibility for the circle hoax and
successfully fooled Delgado under the watchful eyes of a newspaper. They said
they had created the most publicized circles from l980 onward, after seeing a
circle in Australia in l966, which they did not fake. Bower and Chorley added
that they had deliberately escalated their activities to fake new amazing patterns
in direct response to Meaden’s ever more convoluted theories. This was just as
Randles and Fuller had predicted in their book the year before.
After the tricksters quit in l991, circles continued to appear in some numbers
each summer. Between May and September, in crop fields all over the U.K.,
although mostly in south west England, a wide range still do appear. After the
publicity blitz from l989 onward, they were also found all over the world.
While termed “crop circles,” because they mostly appear in cereal fields,
they have, in fact, been reported in grass, reeds, sand, ice, and even on a wet
road surface. They simply last longer in cereal crops, which are permanently
deformed and so remain visible for days or weeks until discovery. Circles in
grass, for example, tend to be blown out within hours and are much less
pronounced.
Following the Bower and Chorley confessions, the media lost virtually all
interest in circles—claiming everyone had been fooled by these two men and
an army of copycat hoaxers that trailed in their wake. Meaden moved on to
other research. The crop circle community, bruised but not defeated, continued
to try to prove that there was a real mystery. BUFORA argued that they had
solved the mystery.
The key may be research by Fuller in the l990s. He made a massive search
for crop circles before the admitted activities of “Doug and Dave.” This search
included scouring old records, scientific literature, and aerial survey
photographs of the landscape taken decades ago. Randles, meanwhile, went to
Queensland to investigate the genesis of the l966 circle—said to have inspired
these two hoaxers.
This turned out to be one of many such patterns found for years in matted
reeds in this poisonous snake infested swamp land south of Cairns. There is
little prospect that these are hoaxes. Yet all were simple, single, oval shapes like
the first ones seen in Britain. Moreover, Fuller found dozens of examples dating
back into the l9th century, including eye witnesses who actually saw circles
form. There were even some folk tales from as far back as the 16th century that
might relate to circles found then and ascribed to the devil. Yet in every case—
and all modern eye-witness sightings—only single, simple circles appeared.
The conclusion that one might reasonably draw from this is that simple
circles can, and do, result from some kind of wind vortex. Throughout history
this has produced occasional crop marks, and that led to the Queensland circles
in l966.
This natural phenomenon then gave Bower and Chorley the idea to create a
hoax back in England. Having faked only simple circles with limited impact,
and seen that there were apparently some genuine cases of a similar nature,
they moved on in response to Meaden and BUFORA’s rational ideas. The
complex patterns, they thought, would prove that an intelligence must lay
behind the marks and scupper Meaden’s theories for good. This happened, in so
far as the media and public were concerned, but led instead to escalating wild
ideas about alien forces.
Once the mythology was in place, there were too many people who had
invested time and effort—not to mention the tourist potential. Some farmers
quickly learned they could earn more from faking a circle and charging
entrance fees than from selling the same corn!
The result is the confusion seen today where arguments rage back and forth.
Yet still nobody has reliably seen or filmed a complex circle pattern being
produced or found any solid evidence of a link with aliens. The case mooted by
BUFORA in l986 still stands up well to scrutiny.
—JENNY RANDLES
References
Andrews, Colin and Delgado, Pat. Circular Evidence, (Bloomsbury, 1989).
Noyes, R., ed. The Crop Circle Enigma (Gateway, 1990).
Fuller, Paul and Randles, Jenny. Mystery of the Circles (BUFORA, 1986).
________. Controversy of the Circles (BUFORA, 1989).
________. Crop Circles: A Mystery Solved? (Robert Hale, 1990; revised 1993).
D
Davenport, Peter B. (b. 1948). Peter Davenport has been Director of the
National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) since July 1994. Born in St.
Louis, Missouri, he attended high school in St. Louis, Ethiopia, and New
Hampshire. He received his undergraduate education at Stanford University in
California, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in both Russian and biology, as
well as a translator’s certificate in Russian translation.
His graduate education was completed at the University of Washington in
Seattle, where he earned an M.S. degree in the genetics and biochemistry of
fish from the College of Fisheries, as well as an M.B.A. degree in finance and
international business from the Graduate School of Business.
Davenport has worked as a college instructor, a commercial fisherman, a
Russian translator in the Soviet Union, a fisheries observer aboard Soviet
fishing vessels, a flight instructor, and a businessman. He was the founding
president of a Seattle-based biotechnology company, which currently employs
over 300 scientists and technicians.
In 1986, he was a candidate for the Washington State legislature, and in
1992, he was a candidate for the U. S. House of Representatives.
Davenport has had an active interest in the UFO phenomenon from his early
boyhood. He experienced his first UFO sighting over the St. Louis municipal
airport in the summer of 1954, and he investigated his first UFO case during
the summer of 1965 in Exeter, New Hampshire.
He has been witness to several anomalous events, possibly UFO-related,
including a dramatic sighting over Baja, California, in February 1990, and
several nighttime sightings over Washington State during 1992.
In addition to being the Director of the National UFO Reporting Center,
Davenport has served as the director of investigations for the Washington
Chapter of the Mutual UFO Network.
P.O. Box 45623

Address: University Station
Seattle, WA 98145
U.S.A.
Peter Davenport
E-mail: director@ufocenter.com
Web site: www.UFOcenter.com
(206) 722-3000
Hotline: (8 A.M. to midnight
Pacific Time preferred)
POSITION STATEMENT: The issue of whether UFOs are both real and of
extraterrestrial origin has been extant in the public forum since its first
appearance in the 1940s. For over half a century, it has remained a subject of
heated debate, with skeptics citing the fact that there is no “hard” evidence
supporting the existence of UFOs.
The proponents, on the other hand, offer up impressive quantities of
principally eyewitness data, which although largely subjective and
circumstantial in nature, is nevertheless quite intriguing. Despite the fact that
most eyewitness reports are of low quality, many of the high-quality sighting
reports involve certain objective aspects, which, to an open-minded bystander,
are quite impressive.
As a full-time, and serious-minded, UFO investigator, I strongly side with
the proponents. It seems indisputable that the phenomenon is real, and that it
falls outside the scope of “normal” human experience.
Strong evidence suggests that we are dealing with a phenomenon that is
being caused by palpable, solid objects whose characteristics are not of human
design, and whose behavior is suggestive of intelligent control.
As a scientist, however, I am quick to add that our understanding of UFOs is
still quite limited, and that the proponents of the phenomenon, and of its
unambiguous involvement with extraterrestrial intelligence, have not provided
unambiguous proof in support of their position. However, that absence of
incontrovertible evidence could change very quickly.
—PETER DAVENPORT
Dawson encounter This event allegedly occurred on August 6, 1977, near

Pelham, Georgia (20 miles north of Thomasville), in Mitchell County. At 10:30
A.M., retired automobile salesman Tom Dawson (sixty-three years old, at the
time) took a walk down to his favorite pond to see how it looked for fishing
later that day.
Just as he got inside the fence surrounding the pond, a circular space ship
zipped right in between the trees and hovered just a few feet above the ground.
At the same time he found himself, his two dogs and twenty head of cattle,
frozen in place by an unseen force.
Dawson said the craft was about 15 feet high and 50 feet in diameter. It had
portholes all around and a dome on top. It made no sound and changed colors
rapidly from one to another. Suddenly, a ramp came down and out came seven
hairless, snowwhite beings, about 5 feet tall, with pointed ears and noses.
Some had on tight fitting one-piece suits while others wore nothing. They
talked in a high-pitched gibberish he could not understand.
They conducted what he thought to be a medical exam of some kind. They
placed a skullcap-like device on his head and a large hula hoop-shaped thing
(connected to a box) around his midsection. After they had collected “some
leaves and stuff,” they got back on the ship and were gone in the blink of an
eye.
Once free, Mr. Dawson ran uphill (about 300 yards) to his trailer. He was
having trouble breathing and talking, so he was taken to the Mitchell County
Hospital, where the doctor said he had been shaken both mentally and
physically from his encounter with the UFO and its occupants. He was treated
for hysteria (given something to calm him down) and later released. Dawson
said he believed that if he had been a younger man the extraterrestrials would
have taken him away.
—BILLY J. RACHELS
Day After Roswell, The (Pocket Books, 1997). Retired U.S. Army Colonel
Philip J. Corso claims in this book that he seeded alien technology harvested
from the Roswell spacecraft crash to American defense contractors resulting in
the development of night vision equipment, lasers, integrated circuit chips, and
other breakthroughs. Though not present at the Roswell crash site in 1947, he
describes what happened and who was there anyway, and says he saw firsthand
one of the extraterrestrial bodies while it was being shipped by truck to Wright
Field in Ohio. This “secret history of the United States since 1947,” as Corso
calls it, culminated in President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, whose real
target wasn’t Soviet ICBM missiles but rather alien spacecraft invading our
skies.
Drawing by Billy Norris as described by the witness in the “Dawson encounter.”

Day the Earth Stood Still, The (20th Century Fox, 1951; directed by Robert
Wise.) An historic “flying saucer” film of the Cold War era, starring Michael
Rennie, Patricia Neal, and Hugh Marlowe.
Unlike most alien-invasion films of the 1950s, the extraterrestrial in this one
is not a monster, but a clean-cut human being who brings a message of love and
peace—backed by enough firepower to annihilate any troublemakers.
Accompanied by an 8-ft.-tall robot wielding an awesome death ray, this
emissary from another planet lands his saucer in Washington, D.C., not far
from the White House lawn. “Klaatu,” as he is called, has come to warn the
people of Earth that those with whom we share the solar system will not
tolerate our ignorant and evil ways. Worried about the atomic bomb in
particular and our tendency toward violence in general, we are told that the
Space People are fully prepared to reduce the Earth to a “burnt-out cinder,” if
need be.
As a demonstration of their power—in addition to the robot’s death ray—
Klaatu arranges for all electrical equipment on Earth to stop, at a prearranged
time, for one day; hence the title of the movie.
As an allegory to Jesus Christ, Klaatu is shot dead by a soldier and
subsequently resurrected by the robot, exercising advanced technology that is
indistinguisable from magic.
Obviously inspired by paranoiac fears of communist subversion, the film is
also important as a prelude to the UFO “contactees” who echoed the same
philosophy, in their best-selling books, a few years later.
—RONALD D. STORY & MARTIN S. KOTTMEYER
Delphos (Kansas) landing trace This case won the National Enquirer’s
$5,000 prize for the UFO story “that supplied the most scientifically valuable
evidence” (of extraterrestrial life) out of more than 1,000 entries submitted in
1972. The selection was made by the Enquirer’s “Blue Ribbon Panel,”
consisting of the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, then an astronomer at Northwestern
University; Dr. James A. Harder, professor of hydraulic engineering at the
University of California at Berkeley; Dr R. Leo Sprinkle, then professor of
counseling services (psychologist) at the University of Wyoming, Laramie; Dr.
Frank B. Salisbury, professor of plant physiology at Utah State University,
Logan; and Dr. Robert F. Creegan, professor of philosophy at the State
University of New York, Albany (the one panel member who did not vote for
the Delphos case).
Here is the story: Shortly after sunset (about 7 P.M. CST), on November 2,
1971, sixteen-year-old Ronnie Johnson was finishing his chores on his parents’
farm when he suddenly heard a loud “rumbling” sound in the direction of the
hog house. Looking up, he suddenly saw a brilliantly lit “mushroom-shaped”
object hovering about two feet above the ground, with a shaft of white light
below and glowing with intensely bright multi-colored light (red, blue, orange,
and yellow), “like the light of a welder’s arc.”
After about five minutes, the nine-foot diameter “craft” suddenly ascended
and started heading south. As it passed over the hog shed, about fifty feet from
the witness, the boy said that the rumbling sound changed to a high pitch “like
a jet,” at which time Ronnie said he was temporarily blinded and completely
paralyzed. About fifteen minutes later (now 7:20 P.M.), his sight and mobility
returned and he burst into the house to tell his parents, Durel, 54, and Erma
Johnson, 49. They rushed out of the house (they were eating dinner at the
time, and had called Ronnie in earlier) just in time to see a bright object
receding to the south. (Apparently, the object was moving very slowly, since it
required fifteen minutes to travel only about 200 feet, as later estimated by Mr.
Johnson, and was close enough to be described by Mrs. Johnson as looking
“like a giant washtub.”)
The Johnsons then rushed over to the spot where the UFO had hovered, and
found the extraordinary, eight foot-diameter-ring, which they said “glowed in
the dark.” (The “ring” was actually shaped something like “an irregular
horseshoe…with an open space to the northwest. The outer diameter was
approximately 90 inches in a northsouth direction and 99 inches in an east-west
direction. The thickness of the horseshoe/ring varied from 12 inches to 30
inches.”)
Mr. Johnson quickly photographed the ring, using a Polaroid camera with a
flashbulb—later claiming that the picture constituted proof that the ring
glowed! The Johnsons further claimed that when they touched the strange,
grayish-white substance of the ring their fingers went numb. The effect did not
last long in the case of Mr. Johnson, but Mrs. Johnson claimed a long-term
numbness in her thigh, where she rubbed her hand after touching the “glowing
ring.”
The site where sixteen-year-old Ronnie Johnson, of Delphos, Kansas, claimed to have seen a
glowing, mushroom-shaped UFO.
Curiously, instead of calling a doctor or reporting the extraordinary incident

to proper authorities (such as the Department of Public Safety or the police),
Durel Johnson got into his truck with his son (this was about 8 P.M.), and headed
straight for the office of the local newspaper. When the Johnsons arrived at the
Delphos Republican, they found the editor Willard Critchfield, who was
apparently unimpressed with the story; he made an excuse why he couldn’t go
to the farm that night and see for himself the evidence of an alleged UFO
landing; nor would he send anyone else to check on the bizarre tale.
Not one to be discouraged, Mr. Johnson drove into town with Ronnie the
next morning, this time seeking to find Critchfield at the main restaurant in
town where the editor usually ate. It happened that Critchfield was not there,
but Johnson did find, instead, Mrs. Lester (Thaddia) Smith, a reporter on the
Republican, who had already heard the UFO story from her boss, and who
already knew the Johnsons. (She later wrote, in a signed testimonial, that: “The
Johnson family having lived in the Delphos Community their entire life are
respected, truthful, conscientious, trustworthy, and well thought of, typical
hard-working Kansas farm family.”)
Mrs. Smith was, therefore, quite willing to visit the Johnson farm (which she
did, in the company of her husband and son-in-law) at around 11:30 A.M. on the
3rd of November. Mrs. Smith apparently accepted the Johnsons’ story at face
value, which she sought to help substantiate by collecting samples of the ring
soil and some tree branches apparently broken off by the departing UFO. She,
in turn, notified the Ottawa County sheriff , Ralph Enlow, who, with Kansas
highway patrol trooper Kenneth Yager and undersheriff Harlan Enlow, arrived
at the Johnson farm at about 2 P.M. also on 3 November. They talked to the
Johnson family and inspected the “landing” site, taking photographs and soil
samples. In addition, undersheriff Enlow stated in his report that: “We used a
Civil Defense Radiological monitor to determine that the soil was not
radioactive.”
Ted Phillips arrived at the scene thirty-one days later, in the company of
sheriff Enlow, for an on-site investigation at the request of Dr. Hynek, Director
of the Center for UFO Studies. Phillips conducted a detailed investigation
which included subsequent testing (by eighteen independent laboratories) of
several soil samples (including comparisons between “ring soil” and “control
soil”), but all the results were inconclusive. The upshot of Phillips’
investigation was: “no definitive conclusion…but, these traces in conjunction
with over 1,000 physical trace reports from around the world do pose
fascinating questions.”
Most fascinating of all were the ring’s special properties. As stated in a
sensational news story in the National Enquirer:
…independent laboratory tests of the soil have shown that it:
• Mysteriously resists water.

• Retards plant growth.
• Has a calcium content up to 10 times higher than the earth around it.
• Contains a “white fibrous substance” that is not in nearby soil.
What is so utterly amazing, however, is how these classic symptoms of the

common fairy ring fungus, Marasmius oreades, had gone unrecognized after
repeated analyses and “investigations” by so many “experts” and others who
should have known better.
What may appear to be a UFO “landing trace” in this picture is actually none other than the”fairy
ring” mushroom, a fungus known to botanists as Marasmius oreades.
According to the Turf Pest Management Handbook: “Fairy rings are likely
to appear if there is an abundance of organic matter in the soil. These fungi
decompose organic matter to products which first stimulate growth of grass.
Then fungus filaments either become so dense that the soil cannot be wetted
and grass plants die from lack of moisture, or they excrete a toxic substance
which inhibits growth of the grass.”
In fact, there was abundant organic matter found in the ring soil (according
to a report by Dr Harold H. Williams, a geochemist, who analyzed a sample
sent to him at Sunwapta Minerals Ltd. of Canada by APRO, and confirmed by
an independent analysis performed at the request of Kansas City lawyer—and
part-time UFO investigator—the late Clancy D. Tull).
In addition, there were other factors which normally contribute to the
accelerated growth of the fairy ring fungus: recent heavy rains, leaves having
fallen from the overhanging elm trees (creating a good humus), and animal
urine in the soil (providing the necessary nitrogen for good fertilization).
There is also the curious fact that the “white fibrous substance” had
“penetrated” the soil to a depth of fourteen inches. Such deep growth is also
typical of Marasmius, which can sometimes grow to a depth of seven feet.
Many of the surrounding elm trees also show signs of disease (as can be seen in
photographs taken within a few days of the supposed incident) which, again,
figured in the Johnson’s report. (It was said that the bark of the trees facing the
ring also glowed in the dark, just as the ring did.) Indeed, Marasmius happens
to be known as a wood-rotting fungus of living trees (especially elm) that
appears on the outer bark—as can be verified by consulting the Index of Plant
Diseases in the United States, Agricultural Research Service Handbook No
165.
Another symptom is the accelerated growth of mushrooms (or “toadstools”)
in the vicinity of the ring, which also occurred in due course. And, according to
a letter dated 30 November 1972 (in APRO’s files), from Dr. Alexander H.
Smith of the University of Michigan Herbarium, a sample sent to him by none
other than Blue Ribbon Panel member and botanist Dr. Frank B. Salisbury was
apparently identified as none other than Marasmius oreades, the common fairy
ring mushroom!
As for the associated UFO sighting, several factors tend to discredit the
account given by the Johnson boy: all investigators agree that no evidence was
ever found of soil-heating, as might be expected from a brilliantly-lit UFO
“blasting off.” In fact, there is strong evidence that the ground (it is said) under
the hovering UFO was not disturbed at all! As can be seen in photographs,
taken within twenty-four hours of the supposed “landing” or “hovering” of the
UFO, there were several small twigs resting directly on top of the whitish ring
which showed no signs of being disturbed. If the object did indeed leave the
“glowing ring” as evidence of its visit, one would logically expect that it would
have at least deposited some of the same material on the overlying twigs, if not
burning or blowing them completely away.
To make matters worse, from the standpoint of witness credibility, Ronnie
Johnson reported that the UFO returned on April 27, 1974, and he predicts it
will return again a third time. Ronnie also claims to have acquired psychic
powers since the first UFO incident, and to have observed other strange goings
on. To wit, during the summer of 1973, he claims to have spotted, and chased, a
creature dubbed the “Wolf Girl”—described “as having wild blonde hair,
wearing a torn red dress of cloth, about three feet tall and standing with a stoop.
“When it ran, it got down on all fours and ran away faster than anything
human can run,” Ronnie said.
—RONALD D. STORY
Demon-Haunted World, The (Random House, 1995). Astronomer Carl

Sagan’s last major book, published before his death. Addressing pseudoscience
issues, Sagan devotes a section to alien abduction accounts, which he explains
as a type of sleep disturbance that gullible researcher-hypnotists have
manipulated for profit. Nonetheless, the eminent astronomer believes there is
“genuine scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions”—only it has to do
with brain physiology, the nature of hallucinations, the psychology of systems
of manipulation and belief, and “perhaps even the origins of our religions.”
demonic theory of UFOs One explanation of UFOs is that they are demonic
in nature; a logical theory in the sense that if they could be angels from God,
they could also be the Devil and his demons, or a mixture of both in a classical
religious dualism. (See RELIGION AND UFOS)
To ask if UFOs are demonic is to ask in the broadest sense if UFOs are evil,
or at least, if their conduct toward man would be evil from man’s point of view.
Much modern science fiction in books and movies has dealt with the theme that
Earth might be “invaded” by evil powers from another world. This view is not
too far from the view of Christian fundamentalism that there are evil powers,
devils, and demons, beyond man’s control, which can invade this world.
While most students of UFOs believe their nature and intention are “good,”
the alternative must certainly be seriously considered. The “good” theories of
UFOs see them either as benevolent scientific beings trying to make peaceful
contact with our world (as in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
or as the angels of God, shepherds watching over their flocks of human sheep
by night.
But the idea that UFOs are “good” is not totally obvious. In UFO literature,
the obvious fact is that UFOs, if they are operated by some higher intelligence,
do not make overt contact with the human race. How can we trust a reality
which insists on hiding from us? If the intentions of UFOs were honorable, the
argument goes, wouldn’t they land openly? (The most obvious reply to this is:
God is supposed to be good, but He is not too open about it either.)
One of the difficulties about the UFO problem is knowing precisely which
data is reliable. Reliable or not, there are reports of UFOs shooting down
fighter planes (usually after being attacked first), of humanoids giving off
strange sounds and smells, of UFOs or their occupants paralyzing humans with
various types of weapons, and also of humans being kidnapped, and later
released, often with severe psychological aftereffects, as in the Barney and
Betty Hill abduction case . Furthermore, people who have been in contact with
UFOs sometimes develop unusual psychic powers—gaining prophetic ability in
visions and dreams. There have been rumors that UFO beings are vampirelike,
draining blood from domestic animals. In some ways, UFO stories often border
on spiritualism.
How do we develop a consistent theory to explain the “unpleasant” data
associated with UFOs? The most obvious way is to say that UFOs, from a
human point of view, are evil. What is the nature of this evil? There are at least
four categories of the evil or demon theory of UFOs: (1) the secular-scientific
theory, (2) the secular-psychic theory, (3) the secular-supernatural theory, and
(4) the religious-supernatural theory. Some of these theories are fairly well
developed; others are very much in the embryo stage.
(1) The secular-scientific theory of UFOs sees them as evil or demonic in
the sense that they have been deceptive in the influence of our religious values
and beliefs. One famous UFO sighting occurred at Fatima, Portugal, in
1917. This sighting followed the vision of the Virgin Mary as reported by a
group of children on the thirteenth day of several successive months, ending in
a bright object in the sky witnessed by perhaps 70,000 people. Jacques Vallée,
in his book Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), wonders with G. Inglefield if
Fatima was really a religious miracle, or “a gesture of mocking”? In other
words, was Fatima some kind of cosmic trick pulled on some gullible
Catholics?
This view of religion is exemplified by the theory of R. L. Dione in his book
God Drives a Flying Saucer (1969). Dione argues that God is really a
spaceman who used an advanced technology to “fool” people into believing he
had divine power. The miracles of Jesus were computerized tricks worked out
on buttons pushed in a controlled spacecraft, which followed Jesus in his
ministry and helped establish his divine reputation. In other words, the biblical
religion is really a fraud, a scientific fraud perpetrated by beings from a higher
technical civilization. Maybe Dione would not call these beings “demonic,” but
the Devil could hardly have a better advocate. The biblical religion turns out, in
Dione’s view, to be a big celestial joke. The reason UFOs don’t land is that we
would discover the nature of the fraud.
(2) The second theory of UFOs as demonic is what I call the secular-psychic
theory. The origins of this theory go back to Carl Jung’s book, Flying Saucers:
A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1959), advances in historical
content in Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia (1970), and continues in
Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman’s book The Unidentified, (1975). Another
title for this theory might be “The Global Nervous Breakdown Theory.”
Jung argued from the beginning that UFOs were psychological archetypes of
the soul, round in shape, glowing in the dark. The old religions had died, and
the world needed an image of a divine power flying to us from the heavens to
save us. So, the human collective unconscious invented the UFO, a modern
myth. Vallée shows how many UFO stories are Similar to folklore and fairy
stories of old. Clark and Coleman carried this further and suggested that due to
the stress of our scientific age, we may be having a kind of collective nervous
breakdown. Our rational-scientific side has buried our unconscious (psychic)
side, and the soul is fighting back with the UFO myth.
The reason this theory takes on demonic dimensions is that there is concern
that the unconscious may win the battle over the rational completely, and this
would throw the human race back to the jungle—to the days of instinct and
emotion without the control of reason. UFOs in this theory are a sign that the
collective psyche of man is breaking down and, therefore, civilization is
breaking down. We are destroying ourselves by an invisible power, our own
unconscious minds. Jungians might not call this theory “demonic,” but it is
hardly good news.
(3) The third theory of UFOs as demonic is the secular-supernatural theory,
developed almost entirely by John A. Keel in books such as UFOS: Operation
Trojan Horse (1970) and The Mothman Prophecies (1975). Keel’s theory is that
UFOs are a reality from another dimension—an almost supernatural dimension
in the midst of our world. The UFO beings from this world Keel calls
“ultraterrestrials.”
I call Keel’s theory “secular-supernatural” because the UFO beings have
what we would traditionally call supernatural power, but Keel tries to avoid
making a religious connection with UFOs. From his point of view, UFOs come
from a dimension right in the midst of us (much as I have argued in the chapter
“Where Is Heaven?” in my 1968 book The Bible and Flying Saucers. Keel’s
beings sometimes have a demonic nature, but much of the time they seem to fly
into our world the way we go to the movies for entertainment.
The Mothman Prophecies may be one of the most important (and least read)
UFO books ever published. In it Keel explains his attempt to track down a
UFO-related vision of impending doom, which turns out to be the collapse of
the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It seems clear to Keel that
the UFO beings knew in advance of the collapse of the bridge, and they let him
know of the impending disaster; enough so that he knew they knew, but not
enough so he could avert it. Other unsettling aspects of Keel’s book include his
impression that the UFO beings knew his every move and every thought, in
advance. Maybe they even controlled his mind. One reason Keel’s work may
not have received much attention is that its implications are too unsettling.
(4) The religious-supernatural theory of UFOs does not find John Keel’s
work too unsettling at all. Christian fundamentalist millennialists love Keel’s
theory, for it means that the Devil and his demons have been set loose on Earth
in preparation for the end and the Second Coming of Christ.
The religious-supernatural theory has been developed by Chfford Wilson in
his book U.F.Os and Their Mission Impossible (1974), and by John Weldon
with Zola Levitt in their work UFOs: What on Earth is Happening? (1975).
These Christian fundamentalists argue that UFOs are just as bad as John Keel
says (they draw from his work), and a lot worse. It is the Devil and his angels
let loose to torment civilization, to lead us to repent and believe in Christ,
before he comes to judge the Earth. Weldon is a student of the theology of Hal
Lindsey (Late Great Planet Earth, 1970, and Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet
Earth, 1972), and UFOs along with the atomic bomb are a sign the end is near.
The weakness of the works of Wilson and Weldon is they support a religious
dualism, of God and the Devil who are almost coequals fighting for the Earth.
In traditional Christian theology, the Devil or Satan is only a “tester,” working
under God’s direction. He has no authority except from God. In considering the
religious nature of UFOs, “point of view” must be considered. Thus, as I have
argued in The Bible and Flying Saucers, angels of God in the “pillar of cloud
and fire” may have caused the parting of the Red Sea to save the Jews. This
same power drowned the Egyptians. From the Jewish point of view, the pillar
of cloud was an angel; from the Egyptian point of view, a demon.
—BARRY H. DOWNING
References
Clark, Jerry, and Loren Coleman. The Unidentified (Warner Books, 1975).
Dione, R. L. God Drives a Flying Saucer (Exposition Press, 1969; Bantam Books, 1973).
Downing, Barry. The Bible and Flying Saucers (J. B. Lippincott, 1968; Avon, 1970; Sphere Books, 1973;
Marlowe, 1997).
Jung, C.G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Routledge & Kegan
Paul/Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1959; Signet/NAL, 1969; Princeton University Press, 1978). Original
German language edition published in 1958.
Keel, John A. The Eighth Tower (Saturday Review Press, 1975; Signet/NAL, 1977).
________. Operation Trojan Horse (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
________. The Mothman Prophecies (Signet/NAL, 1975).
Lindsey, Hal. The Late Great Planet Earth (Zondervan Books, 1970).
Norman, Eric. Gods, Demons and Space Chariots (Lancer Books, 1970).
________. Gods and Devils From Outer Space (Lancer Books, 1973).
Spielberg, Steven. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Dell, 1977).
Vallée, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Henry Regnery, 1965; Ace Books, 1966).
________. Passport to Magnonia (Henry Regnery, 1969).
Weldon, John, and Zola Levitt. UFOs: What On Earth is Happening? (Harvest House, 1975).
Wilson, Clifford, and John Weldon. Close Encounters: A Better Explanation (Master Books, 1978).
Wilson, Clifford. UFOs and Their Mission Impossible (Signet/NAL, 1974).
densification A process whereby non-physical spiritual energies, ideas, and

tendencies become anchored in the physical body and personality over time.
This process is common for ET Walk-ins as they learn to integrate new spiritual
and psychological qualities, associated with the new entering soul.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Dick, Steven J. (b. 1949). An astronomer and historian of science at the U. S.
Naval Observatory since 1979, Steven Dick is best known as an historian of the
extraterrestrial life debate. He obtained his B.S. in astrophysics (1971), and
M.A. and Ph.D. (1977) in history and philosophy of science from Indiana
University. His doctoral dissertation was subsequently published as Plurality of
Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to
Kant (1982).
Steven Dick
Dr. Dick tackled the entire scope of the twentieth century debate in The
Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and
the Limits of Science (1996), and its abridgement and update Life on Other
Worlds (1998). The latter works argue that the idea of extraterrestrial life is a
world view analogous to the Copernican theory, with widespread implications.
Dick has written on these implications, notably in a volume he edited entitled
Many Worlds: The New Universe, Extraterrestrial Life and the Theological
Implications (2000).
Dr. Dick has served as Chairman of the Historical Astronomy Division of

the American Astronomical Society (1993-1994), and as President of the
History of Astronomy Commission of the International Astronomical Union
(1997-2000).
United States
Naval Observatory
Address: Code PAS
3450 Massachusetts Ave. N.W. Washington, DC 20392
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: The vast majority of UFO cases have prosaic

explanations, including the planet Venus, balloons, hoaxes, and so on.
The question is what is the nature of the remaining few percent? In my view
these few percent deserve further study, although it is unlikely they are
extraterrestrial spacecraft for many reasons. They may be primarily a
psychological or sociological phenomenon, but there is a chance they may be a
physical phenomenon we do not yet understand.
Nevertheless, seen in the broad context of the history of the extraterrestrial
life debate, UFOs are one way (science fiction is another) that popular culture
deals with the world view that extraterrestrial intelligence represents. Like so
many other elements in the debate over life on other worlds, the resolution of
the UFO question is deeply embedded in the problem of the nature of evidence
and inference.
These problems, as well as the fascinating history of the UFO debate, are
discussed in my book The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century
Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (1996) and its
abridgement and update Life on Other Worlds (1998).
The effect on humanity of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence depends
very much on the contact scenario, especially whether it is remote contact by
radio, or direct contact.
If one accepts the premise that a universe filled with life is a world view, the
best way to study the implications is by using historical analogues. One may
study the trajectory of major world views such as the Copernican theory.
Alternately, an appropriate analogue for remote contact would be the
transmission of knowledge from ancient Greece to the Latin West via the Arabs
in the 12th century; this input of knowledge resulted in the Renaissance of
Western civilization.
—STEVEN J. DICK
Did Spacemen Colonise the Earth? (Pelham Books, 1974). Robin Collyns
of New Zealand who claims his ideas were shaped by Buddhist philosophy,
believes Earth was established as a waystation for reincarnated souls from other
parts of the universe, which explains our planet’s racial and linguistic diversity.
Our own solar system is inhabited by extraterrestrials who have captured and
even repaired satellites launched by humans. These beneficient aliens live on
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune, but have remained invisible to us because
they scramble or censor our satellite photos.
Downing, Barry H. (b. 1938). Barry Downing is an important proponent of the

ancient astronaut theory as it applies to biblical interpretation. His book The
Bible and Flying Saucers (1968), which deals primarily with the material in the
Book of Exodus as it relates to possible descriptions of UFO intervention, is
considered a classic.
Dr. Downing is presently the pastor of Northminster Presbyterian Church in
End-well, New York. He has been an advisor in theology to the Mutual UFO
Network (MUFON) for more than twenty years, and is on the national board of
directors of the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR). He has published more than
thirty articles and papers in the field of UFOs and religion. He is listed in Who’s
Who in Theology and Science.
Barry Downing
Born in Syracuse, New York, Downing received his elementary education in

that state, and his B.A. degree in physics, from Hartwick College, Oneonta,
New York. His other degrees are as follows: B.D. in theology, Princeton
Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey; and Ph.D. in philosophy of
science and religion, University of Edinburgh, New College, Edinburgh,
Scotland. Downing was ordained as a United Presbyterian clergyman on March
5, 1967.
P. O. Box 8655
Address: Endwell, NY 13762
U.S.A.

POSITION STATEMENT: My main area of study has concerned the possible
relation between UFOs and the biblical religion. My theory is that some, if not
all modern UFOs are related to what has been called the “angelic reality”
reported in the Bible.
My theory, worked out in my book The Bible and Flying Saucers is that
UFOs come from another dimension, a parallel universe “in the midst of us” as
Jesus said (Luke 17:21). According to the Bible, God is invisible, but his angels
can become visible if they need to, and so the reports of visible angels in the
Bible. Furthermore, these angels often have forms of space transportation,
reported as the “pillar of cloud and of fire” of the Exodus, the “chariot of fire”
of Elijah, the “wheels” of Ezekiel, the bright “glory” hovering over the
shepherds at the birth of Jesus, the “bright cloud” over Jesus at his
transfiguration and ascension, and the “bright light” over the Apostle Paul on
the Damascus Road. The angels were understood to travel on the “clouds of
heaven,” a description parallel with many modern UFOs which often have a
cloudlike appearance.
I believe the Exodus UFO, the “pillar of cloud and of fire,” used its powers
to split the waters of the Red Sea, and that this same UFO on the ground in a
thicket caused the famous “burning bush” of Moses.
Psalm 23 says “Me Lord is my shepherd,” and I believe the modern UFO
reports indicate that the “angels of God” are still with us, doing their shepherd
work—by night and day.
—BARRY H. DOWNING
Drake Equation How can we estimate the number of technological

civilizations that might exist among the stars? While working as a radio
astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West
Virginia, Dr. Frank Drake (now President of the SETI Institute) conceived an
approach to quantify the factors involved in estimating the number of
technological civilizations that may exist in our galaxy.
The Drake Equation, as it has come to be known, was first presented by
Drake in 1961 and identifies specific factors thought to play a role in the
development of such civilizations. Although there is no unique solution to this
equation, it is a generally accepted tool used by the scientific community to
examine these factors. The equation is expressed as follows:
N=R*·fp·ne·fl fi·fc·L
N The number of civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy whose radio emissions are detectable.
The rate of formation of suitable stars: The rate of formation of stars with a large enough “habitable
R*
zone”
The fraction of those stars with planets: The fraction of Sun-like stars with planets is currently
fp
unknown, but evidence indicates that planetary systems may be common for stars like the Sun.
The number of “Earths” per planetary system: How many planets occupy a habitable zone where it
ne would be able to maintain a temperature that would allow liquid water? A planet in the habitable zone
could have the basic conditions for life as we know it.
The fraction of those planets where life develops: Although a planet orbits in the habitable zone of a
fl suitable star, other factors are necessary for life to arise. Thus, only a fraction of suitable planets will
actually develop life.
The fraction of life sites where intelligence develops: Life on Earth began over 3.5 billion years ago.
fi Intelligence took a long time to develop. On other life-bearing planets it may happen faster, it may
take longer, or it may not develop at all.
The fraction of planets where technology develops: The fraction of planets with intelligent life that
fc develop technological civilizations, i.e., technology that releases detectable signs of their existence
into space.
The “Lifetime” of communicating civilizations:
L
The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
Within the limits of our existing technology, any practical search for distant
intelligent life must necessarily be a search for some manifestation of a distant
technology.
A search for extraterrestrial radio signals has long been considered the most
promising approach by the majority of the scientific community.
Besides illuminating the factors involved in such a search, the Drake
Equation is a simple, effective tool for stimulating intellectual curiosity about
the universe around us, for helping us to understand that life as we know it is
the end product of a natural, cosmic evolution and for making us realize how
much we are a part of that universe.
—SETI INSTITUTE
Drake, Frank (b. 1930). Widely known for his beliefs that life exists elsewhere
in the universe, Frank Drake is a leading authority on methods for the possible
detection of extraterrestrial intelligent signals. His pioneering efforts in this
field are widely recognized and highly respected. Dr. Drake is currently
Chairman of the Board at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and
Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics (since 1984) at the University of
California at Santa Cruz. From 1984-1988, he was Dean of Natural Sciences,
and from 1988-1990: President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
Dr. Drake shared in the discovery of the radiation belts of Jupiter (1959) and
played an important role in the observational studies which led to the early
understanding of pulsars. He received a B.A. in Engineering Physics from
Cornell University in 1952, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Astronomy from Harvard
University in 1956 and 1958 respectively. Dr. Drake is a member of numerous
professional societies and international organizations, including the prestigious
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
From 1952-55, he was an electronics officer in the U. S. Navy. At Harvard, he
was associated with the Agassiz Station Radio Astronomy Project, specializing
in 21-cm research, and the development of infrared photometers. From 1958-
1963, he was head of the Telescope Operations and Scientific Services Division
at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia.
While at Green Bank, he carried out planetary research as well as studies of
cosmic radio sources, and conducted the first organized search for extraterrestrial
intelligent radio signals, known as OZMA. In the fall of 1963, he became chief
of the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Section of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
California Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty at Cornell University in
1964, first as an associate professor of Astronomy, then, from 1966-1984 as a
full professor.
Frank Drake
From 1966-68, he was the director of the Arecibo Observatory, near

Arecibo, Puerto Rico. From 1969-71, he was chairman of Cornell’s Astronomy
Department, and was Director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere
Center (of which the Arecibo Observatory is part) from 1970 to 1981.
Dr. Drake was among the first to show how interstellar messages could be
constructed for easy radio transmission. In 1960, about the same time he
conducted project OZMA, he pioneered in the development of binary coded
messages from which a “picture” could be obtained after proper decryption of
the codes. Dr. Drake constructed the first interstellar message ever transmitted
via radio waves by our planet for the benefit of any extraterrestrial civilizations.
This message is known as the “Arecibo Message of November 1974.” Three
messages, utilizing the techniques and methods developed by Dr. Drake, have
already been sent to outer space. They are the Pioneer 10 and 11 Plaques
(designed by Drake, Sagan, and Sagan), the Voyager Record on board the
Voyager spacecraft (conceived by Drake and compiled by a host of contributors
in addition to Drake), and the Arecibo Message of 1974.
Dr. Drake also devised an equation by which he gave an estimate of the
number of communicative extraterrestrial civilizations we might find in our
galaxy. Known as the Drake equation, N=R*·fp·ne·fl fi·fc·L is still valid and is
regarded as the authority on the number of detectable civilizations.
Dr. Drake is the author of Intelligent Life in Space (1962), a contributor to
UFOs—A Scientific Debate, edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page (1972),
“Communication with Other Intelligences” in Prospects for Man—
Communication, edited by W. J. Megaw (1977), coauthor with Sagan et al. of
Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (1978), and coauthor with
Dava Sobel of Is Anyone Out There? (1992).
2035 Landings Drive

Address: Mountain View, CA 94043
U.S.A.
Web site: www.seti.org
POSITION STATEMENT: There is no general explanation of the UFO

phenomenon which is complete and accurate. The UFO phenomenon is very
likely more than one phenomenon, including at least very rare natural events and
misinterpretations of rare but spectacular natural events. There is no good
evidence for further origins of the UFO phenomenon.
The best hope for progress with UFOs is to obtain a variety of good
quantitative observations of one of the more spectacular and “strange” cases.
These observations should include high-quality photographs, calibrated, with
good time references. Sound recordings, spectral information, and possibly
radioactivity and magnetic activity recordings would be requirements.
Unfortunately, I see no practical way to provide instrumentation in sufficient
quantity to assure that such a set of observations win be made in the foreseeable
future.
—FRANK DRAKE
Drake, W. Raymond (1913-1989). British author Walter Raymond Drake was

a pioneer in the ancient astronaut field. He published numerous articles on the
topic, beginning in 1957, followed by his book, Gods or Spacemen? first
published in 1964.
W. Raymond Drake
A retired customs official, Mr. Drake spent twenty-five years promoting the
ancient astronaut theory, most notably in his nine books: Gods or Spacemen?
(1964), Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East (1968), Gods and Spacemen in
the Ancient West (1974), Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient Past (1975), Gods
and Spacemen Throughout History (1975), Gods and Spacemen in Greece and
Rome (1976), Gods and Spacemen in Ancient Israel (1976), Messengers from
the Stars (1977), and Cosmic Continents (1986).
POSITION STATEMENT: Since 1957 I have given profound attention to the

enigma of UFOs, which I consider the most baffling problem of the century.
I support the theory of extraterrestrials from other planets although I do
recognize the formidable arguments of UFOs from inner etherean realms; the
inner-Earth; time-travelers from the past or future; of even ultraterrestrials
sharing our planet, but existing in another space-time continuum. With the
confused information at our disposal, it is impossible to make a definite
appraisal regarding their true origin. Recent research seems to indicate psychic
influence beyond our cognizance. Several cases of abduction of men and
women, past and presents make us wonder.
Many years ago, influenced by the Master Charles Fort, who collected
unusual cosmic data for modern times in his wonderful books, I aspired to
collect as many facts as possible from ancient literature to chronicle for the past
what Charles Fort has so brilliantly done for the present century. I spent many
years reading the classics and ancient histories in many languages, and in 1964
published Gods or Spacemen?, the first of nine books,, wherein I detailed my
researches covering most countries of the world, proving to my own
satisfaction at least, that the gods of antiquity were spacemen, who landed and
ruled our Earth in a Golden Age, bringing civilization to mankind.
Can our word “God” have at least two meanings? The Absolute imagining
the Universe, in Whom we live and move, and the local “Gods” of Space-
Beings, who originate from some advanced planet and from time to time
manifest themselves among men? This startling conception could prove the
fundamental discovery of our century. Our ancestors believed the Gods, the
Spacemen, inspired them.
Gazing aloft in humility at those shining stars amid the dark, unfathomable
infinitudes, we marvel at this magic, mysterious Universe and with sudden
loneliness wonder who we are and why we find ourselves living now on
ancient Earth.
A wondrous Renaissance of cosmic wisdom slowly dawns, soon to shine in
spiritual splendor inspiring us all to think as Earth-folk, people of a small but
proud planet, eager to meet our fellow men from other worlds. Salvation may
descend from the skies. To communicate with the Spacemen on their cultural
level, we must soar beyond our earthly ethics and expand to Cosmic
Consciousness attuning our souls to all Creation.
—W. RAYMOND DRAKE
Druffel, Ann (b. 1926). A California native, Ann Druffel received her B.A.
degree in Sociology from Immaculate Heart College (Hollywood) and did
graduate studies toward an M.A. in Social Case Work at the National Catholic
School of Social Service (Catholic University, Washington D.C.). She worked
for five years as a social caseworker for family- and child-welfare agencies.
She retains a lifetime RSW (Registered Social Worker) in California. She
married Charles K. Druffel in 1953. They have five daughters.
Ann Druffel
Her interest in UFOs stems from a personal sighting with another adult
witness of a luminous daytime object over Long Beach, California in Summer
1945. “Seemingly high above the Earth,” she says, this object released
numerous small objects which reflected the sun and disappeared after departing
on different paths up and out from the main object She has been a UFO
researcher in the Southern California area since 1957, beginning as an
investigator for NICAP, and subsequently for MUFON and CUFOS.
Besides her investigative and research work, she was an associate editor of
the MUFON UFO Journal from 1977 through 1983, is presently a contributing
editor for that journal. and is a consultant for Flying Saucer Review, published
in England.
She is Project Coordinator for Skynet, a public filter-center and tracking
system, from 1965 to the present. This work has revealed certain correlative
patterns in UFO activity on which Druffel has reported in UFO symposia and
conferences.
She has been a free-lance writer since 1969 with 100+ articles published in
the areas of UFOs, psychic phenomena and other subjects, plus film credits
(documentary and screenplay). She is the author, with D. Scott Rogo, of The
Tujunga Canyon Contacts.
She is currently with the Mobius Society in Los Angeles, assisting in
psychic archaeology and intuitive criminology projects, and other experiments
into the study of human consciousness. She is an accomplished remote viewer
and certified hypnotist.
257 Sycamore Glen
Address: Pasadena, CA 91105
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: UFOs present an urgent problem to the human race.

For that reason, attitudes of secrecy and deliberate ridicule employed by world
governments is dangerous and foolish. The mystery must be solved by physical
and social scientists and other professional researchers, including philosophers
and theologians. No facet of man’s knowledge should be overlooked in the
attempt to unravel this enigma.
UFOs apparently have been with us since prehistoric times; UFOs shapes
found in Magdalenian cave art may be evidence that some unknown type of
intelligence observed the human race’s evolutionary leap from Neanderthal to
Cro-Magnon. UFOs, as described in the Old Testament, seemed instrumental in
the formation of the first major monotheistic culture. Reports of “jinns” in
Islam, and “incubi” and “succubae” which reportedly harassed humans in
medieval times indicate that extradimensional intelligence beings have
interacted with the human race; these reports have aspects in common with
present-day UFO activity. They cannot explain all UFO reports, however; it is
likely that UFOs are multi-sourced. The multisource hypothesis would include:
(1) physical extraterrestrial visitors; (2) unknown life forms normally invisible
to us but capable of penetrating into our space-time; (3) time travelers.
There is little doubt, however, that the human race is currently under
observation by unknown order of intelligence(s), interested in human
technology, and having particular interest in human reproduction. No reliable
communication has been received from UFO entities to date. “Messages”
received by witnesses, even considering a multisource hypothesis, are vague,
contradictory, and therefore suspect. UFO entities involved in “abduction
scenarios” seem to bode ill for the race; however, a growing body of evidence
indicates that some closeencounter witnesses have successfully used various
metaphysical and mental techniques against them. Intensive research to
discover if unwelcome contacts can be fended off should proceed without
delay.
—ANN DRUFFEL
E
“Earth Chronicles” The “Earth Chronicles” are a series of books by Zecharia

Sitchin that, beginning with The 12th Planet in 1976, combine ancient
cuneiform texts, the Hebrew Bible, and recent scientific discoveries to present a
cohesive tale of how a renegade planet (Nibiru) became the twelfth member
(sun, moon and ten, not nine, planets) of our own solar system, and how its
inhabitants, the Anunnaki, began to come and go between their planet and ours
some 450,000 years ago.
Coming initially to obtain gold needed to protect the dwindling atmosphere
of Nibiru, they ended up creating the “Adam,” a species of primitive workers,
by combining their genes with those of the hominids who had evolved on
Earth. The events that ensued are echoed in the biblical tales of the Garden of
Eden, the Deluge, and the Tower of Babel.
Sitchin’s writings bring to life not only the incredibly advanced civilization
of Sumer that blossomed out 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but also the
Anunnaki themselves: Their first leader Ea, also known as Enki; his half-
brother the commander Enlil, and their half-sister Ninharsag who was the chief
medical officer
The Chronicles follow the tangled tale of gods and men through the
millennia, until in 2024 B.C. one clan of Anunnaki used nuclear weapons to
deprive another of the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula.
The six books, together with the two companion volumes, Genesis Revisited
(1990) and Divine Encounters (1996), throw new light on the enigmas of Mars
(what appears to have existed on it and why spacecraft keep getting lost there),
the true builders of the Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza and their purpose, and the
identity of the Divine Architect of the enigmatic colossal stone structures in
both the Old and New Worlds.
—ETEP STAFF
References
Sitchin, Zecharia. The 12th Planet (Stein & Day, 1976; Avon, 1978).
________. The Stairway to Heaven (St. Martin’s Press, 1980; Avon, 1981).
________. The Wars of Gods and Men (Avon, 1985).
________. The Lost Realms (Avon, 1990).
________. Genesis Revisited (Avon, 1990).
________. When Time Began (Avon, 1993).
________. Divine Encounters (Avon, 1996).
________. The Cosmic Code (Avon, 1999).
Edge of Reality, The (Henry Regnery, 1975). Two pioneers in the UFO
investigative field, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, together offer a progress
report on research and scenarios for resolution of the extraterrestrial visitation
question. Neither of these scientists sees much hope in radio telescope attempts
to contact advanced civilizations. They offer seven scenarios on resolving the
UFO enigma, ranging from extraterrestrial invasion to surrealistic holograms
projected by a cabal of clever scientists.
Eighth Tower, The (Saturday Review Press, 1975). John A. Keel speculates
that a superspectrum of energies encompassing gravity, the magnetic field, and
infrasonic sound, control our observation of UFOs, Men in Black, ghosts,
Bigfoot, and evil itself. This single intelligent force accounts for all religious,
occult, and unexplained phenomena by blindly recording all the electrical
impulses of human minds.
Elk abduction At approximately 11:58 A.M., on Thursday, February 25, 1999,

three forestry workers, located approximately 20 miles west of Mt. St. Helens
in Washington State, suddenly noticed a bizarre object—shaped somewhat like
the heel of a man’s shoe—drifting slowly toward them. It first appeared over a
nearby ridge and was traveling in a northeastly direction. As it approached, the
strange “craft” seemed to hug the contour of the terrain below it, and seemed to
witnesses to be “flying” in a purposeful manner.
The three workers at first thought the object was some kind of parachute that
was drifting and descending, but they quickly realized that their initial
impression was wrong. One of the three immediately shouted to the eleven
other coworkers nearby; then all fourteen members of the work crew stood on
the hillside and watched for an estimated 5 to 10 minutes, as a remarkable
chain of events unfolded in the valley below them.
Within seconds of their first observation of the craft, the witnesses realized
that it appeared to be moving in the direction of a herd of elk that the crew had
been watching all morning. They continued to watch as the object proceeded
directly toward the herd, and succeeded in getting quite close to the animals.
The animals apparently remained unaware of the object’s presence until it was
within a very short distance of the herd.
White dot marks location where elk was abducted in Washington State
Suddenly, the animals became startled and bolted for cover—most of them
running up the slope to the east toward a densely wooded area. However, one
adult animal was seen by the witnesses to separate itself from the herd and trot
generally to the north, along a nearby unused logging road.
The witnesses reported that at this point, the object quickly moved directly
above the lone elk and seemed to “pluck” it off the ground, although no visible
means of support of the animal was evident to the observers.
The witnesses added that immediately upon lifting the elk off the ground,
the object seemed to begin to “wobble” to an even greater degree than it had
exhibited earlier. Also, as the object appeared to increase its altitude, the elk,
which was suspended upright directly below it, rotated slowly beneath it, with
its head apparently in contact with the ventral surface of the craft.
With the elk suspended below, the object began to ascend slowly up a clear-
cut slope to the north, wobbling slowly as moved almost directly away from the
witnesses. However, when it reached a stand of tall trees at the end of the clear-
cut, it appeared to brush the lower branches of the trees, at which point the
object stopped, backed up, and began to rise almost vertically. At this point, the
object appeared to wobble back and forth, i.e. begin a rolling motion from left
to right, at an even more rapid rate.
It appeared to rise vertically over the trees and continued its “flight” to the
north, apparently hugging the contour of the hill below it as it moved. When it
crested the top of the rise, it descended into the neighboring valley to the north,
and disappeared from the sight of the witnesses for a few seconds. Moments
later, they last witnessed the object rising at a steep angle, and at high speed. It
continued rising until it simply disappeared from their sight in the northern sky.
The witnesses stated that once the craft had reached the clear-cut to the
north, they no longer could see the animal suspended below it. Their
presumption was that the elk had somehow been taken into the object, although
they never saw any kind of “door” or aperture through which the animal might
have been conveyed into the craft.
Although there were slight discrepancies between the witnesses with regard
to the appearance of the peculiar object, they agreed that it was relatively small,
perhaps not too much longer than the elk itself. Its shape was reminiscent of the
heel of a man’s shoe, i.e., roughly U-shaped, and slightly tapered toward the aft
end. Also, they agreed that it seemed to exhibit two “stripes,” or patches,
running longitudinally along its dorsal side, one of which appeared red, the
other white.
The witnesses also stated that following the incident, the herd of elk
remained in the same general area, although they remained more closely
huddled together than had been the case earlier in the morning. The workers
added that they, too, had remained closer to one another during the remainder
of the work day, feeling ill at ease about what they had been witness to earlier
in the day.
The case was first investigated jointly by Peter B. Davenport, Director of the
National UFO Reporting Center, and Robert A. Fairfax, Director of
Investigations in Washington State for the Mutual UFO Network. They traveled
to the site of the incident on March 5, 1999, examined the body of an adult
female elk found to the north of the initial abduction site by the land owner, and
interviewed several of the witnesses. The investigation was continued over
subsequent months.
The witnesses were deemed by the investigators to be reliable and sober-
minded, with little to gain from the event. Some of them had been working for
the same company for many years, and were described by their employer to be
excellent employees. The witnesses refused all suggestions that they speak with
the press, or go public in any way, about the alleged incident.
—PETER B. DAVENPORT
Ellwood, Robert S., Jr. (b. 1933). Dr. Ellwood is retired from the University
of Southern California, where he was Professor Emeritus of Religion. A
specialist in the history of religions, Ellwood has written more than twenty
books; the most important of which are Religious and Spiritual Groups in
Modern America (1973), which contains a section on UFO groups, and Many
Peoples, Many Faiths (1976), an introductory textbook in world religions, and
Alternative Altars—Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979).
997 Athens Street
Address: Altadena, CA 91001
U.S.A.
robert_ellwood
E-mail:
@hotmail.com
www.rcf.usc.edu/
Web site:
~ellwood
POSITION STATEMENT: I have no public position on the physical science

aspects of UFOs, since I do not have appropriate competence. I do, however,
have an open mind and lively interest in the matter. My professional concern is
UFO-inspired religious movements. I do not say that they or any other religion
are false; the ultimate origin and meaning of all of humankind's religious
experience and conceptual systems remain too full of mystery for final
pronouncements, and in any case, a religious experience and belief can have rich
subjective validity for a person regardless of what the facts are about its
objective referent. My chief touchstone of interpretation for the evaluation of
UFO religious movements would be Carl lung's concept of the UFO as, for its
religious believers, a “technological angel.”
Humanity’s immemorial spiritual quest, and the symbol systems which
express its findings, change in outer form as world-views and perceptions of
appropriate guises for the transcendent change. UFO religious movements are
interesting and worthy of a certain respect as innovative discoveries of the
transcendent in a form congruous with a scientific and technological age. They
accept and rejoice in the vast universe of space travel and possible
extraterrestrials are given us by modem science rather than compartmentalizing
it off as does so much older religion. In this respect the UFO religionists are
spiritual adventurers and pioneers—people willing to deal with the profound
modem spiritual crisis engendered by our living in the scientific world on the
one hand, while remaining creatures with deep needs for subjective meaning
and identity on the other. By making sacred the UFO, they have resolved the
crisis in one possible way: In their “technological angels” they have given us
striking symbols reconciling the universe of modem cosmology and the human
need for transcendent points of reference. Like any pioneers, they can take false
steps, rush to premature conclusions about the terrain they are exploring, and
even lose their bearings altogether. But they have faced a crisis that many chose
to ignore. They have dealt with it in their own way even at the cost of being
called fools and worse by those who prefer not to perceive that, whether or not
their space contacts are real, the modern spiritual conundrum to which the
contact answers and to which the contactee is alive is real and must be faced
before our culture slips into collective schizophrenia.
—ROBERT ELLWOOD
Elohim The Hebrew word for deity; a plural form translated as “gods” by
Hebrew scholars and UFO theorists alike, thus giving rise to the notion that
extraterrestrials were involved in humanity’s creation.
The UFO-ET interpretation was first suggested in 1960 by UFOlogist
Brinsley Le Poer Trench in his book, The Sky People. Trench, who was called
“the evangelist and top theologian of what amounts to a new galactic religion,”
claimed that the Hebrew version of the Old Testament refers to the Sky People
when it uses the word Elohim; translated as “God” (where it should say “gods”)
in the English Bible. He, and Erich von Däniken after him, called attention to
certain passages in the English version of the Bible that retain the plural form,
particularly Gen. 1: 26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after
our likeness.” “Why does God speak in the plural?” asks von Däniken. One
would think that the one and only God ought to address mankind in the
singular, not in the plural.” (Von Däniken, 1970).
According to Vergilius Ferm’s An Encyclopedia of Religion: “Usually
Hebrew writers speak of gods (elohim) and Yahweh (their god) before the exile
but God (elohim) thereafter.” (Ferm, 1945) However, certain passages of the
English version have retained the plural form, such as the passage (1:26)
quoted above, and the phrase “Behold the man is become as one of us.” (Gen.
3:22)
More recently, the concept of the Elohim as extraterrestrial creators has been
adopted by Zecharia Sitchin in his “Earth Chronicles” series of books and by
the Raelian Religion of Claude Vorilhon (a.k.a. “Rael”).
—RONALD D. STORY
References:
Ferm, Vergilius, ed., An Encyclopedia of Religion (Philosophical Library, 1945).
Raël. The True Face of God (The Raëlian Foundation, 1998).
Sitchin, Zecharia. The 12th Planet (Avon, 1976).
________. The Stairway to Heaven (Avon, 1980).
________. The Wars of Gods and ;Men (Avon, 1985).
________. The Lost Realms (Avon, 1990).
________. Genesis Revisited (Avon, 1990).
________. When Time Began (Avon, 1993).
________. Divine Encounters (Avon, 1996).
________. The Cosmic Code (Avon, 1999).
Story, Ronald D. The Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row/New English Library, 1976).
________. Guardians of the Universe? (New English Library/St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
Trench, Brinsley LePoer. The Sky People (Neville Spearman, 1960).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970; Bantam Books, 1971).
Elohim of Peace Comparable to “Cosmic Christ,” this term indicates a

transcendent spiritual being or universal principle of peace and harmony, which
can overshadow or inspire those individuals who are sufficiently evolved, and
who seek to be used in the service of cosmic evolution on Earth.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Encyclopedia of UFOs, The (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).

Compiled and edited by Ronald Story, this was the first UFO encyclopedia ever
produced and remains a standard reference on the subject.
Former Fate magazine editor Jerome Clark stated in his review: “…by any
standard Encyclopedia is a magnificent achievement. It is, as all of us who
awaited its appearance hoped it would be, the essential UFO reference work.”
Clark subsequently produced his own UFO Encyclopedia (Apogee Books,
1990; Omnigraphics, 1998).
When combined with the present work (The Encyclopedia of
Extraterrestrial Encounters), readers will have a balanced set of books from
which to draw their own conclusions.
Ether Ship and Its Solution, The (Borderland Sciences, 1950). Meade
Layne has the distinction of being the first author to combine ancient astronaut
theory speculations with a clearly metaphysical explanation for UFOs. From
the etheric plane, seemingly empty space, these craft and their etheric pilots
have materialized for thousands of years to help accelerate the evolution of
human consciousness. Nine years before Carl Jung tried to tailor (in print) the
UFO phenomenon to his theories of the collective unconscious, Layne was
using a Jungian approach by explaining how these manifestations from the
etheric realm could be thought forms produced by the human unconscious
mind.
Evans, Hilary (b.1929) Hilary Evans is a prolific writer/researcher and a

leading proponent of the psychosocial approach to the UFO mystery. He works
as a picture librarian, assisting his wife who is the proprietor of the Mary Evans
Picture Library.
Born in Shrewsbury, England, Evans was educated at Cambridge and
Birmingham Universities, where he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in
English literature in 1951 and 1953, respectively. His early writings—UFOs,
the Greatest Mystery (1979) and The Evidence for UFOs (1982)—were
straightforward assessments of the UFO phenomenon. In 1987 he devised and
edited, with John Spencer, the international compilation UFOs 1947-1987, and
in turn assisted Spencer on another compilation: Phenomenon (1988); both on
behalf of BUFORA, on whose Council both serve. His more individual
researches are embodied in three books: Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors
(1984) ; Gods, Spirits, Cosmic Guardians (1987); and Alternate States (1989).
Though none of these is a UFO book as such, they are relevant to UFO research
in that they are largely concerned with alleged encounters with otherworldly
entities.
Hilary Evans
Evans is a frequent contributor to many UFO publications and lectures

widely in North America and Europe. His most recent books include: Almanac
of the Uncanny (1995), UFOs: 1947-1997 (ed. with Dennis Stacy), and From
Other Worlds (1998).
59 Tranquil Vale
Address: London SE3 OBS
England
E-mail: hevans@satven.co.uk
POSITON STATEMENT: Of course there are objects flying about which we

can’t identify, and to that extent UFOs exist. But so long as the evidence for
physical UFOs—let alone extraterrestrial visitation—rests on witness testimony,
so long will it be subject to the reservations with which all such testimony must
be received. Psychological and sociological findings show that we cannot set any
limits to what the subconscious mind can devise and impose upon the conscious
mind; so until I see convincing evidence for an external source, I find it easier to
believe that it is to the subconscious mind of the individual that we must look for
the most probable origin of most UFO reports.
While this can be seen as a form of debunking, I prefer to see it rather as a
shift of interpretation. Simply because we cannot take an encounter experience
at face value does not mean that it is has no other value. Those who claim
abduction experiences, for example, are for the most part neither charlatans nor
pathological cases; rather, they are people whose personal circumstances have
interacted with the cultural ambiance to confuse fantasy with reality
Approached on this level, the UFO experience can tell us a great deal about
human behavior, both individual and social. Findings such as those of Alvin
Lawson, and speculations such as those of Jacques Vallée and Mark Moravec
should therefore be of the greatest interest to the behavioral scientist. At the
same time it is clear that many UFO cases involve physical phenomena of an
extremely interesting kind. Consequently, I find the work of Persinger,
Rutkowski, Long, and others, and the fieldwork of Harley Rutledge and Project
Hessdalen, to be of great potential value to our knowledge of the world around
us.
—HILARY EVANS
Exeter (New Hampshire) sightings The Exeter case represents one of the
most spectacular and best-corroborated UFO close encounters of all time.
About half past midnight on Friday, September 3, 1965, Officer Eugene F.
Bertrand, of the Exeter (New Hamsphire), Police Department, was on routine
patrol on the outskirts of Exeter when he spotted an automobile parked beside
the road on Route 101. He stopped his patrol car to investigate, and upon
approaching the vehicle, he found a lone woman in the car who appeared to be
extremely upset. When Officer Bertrand inquired what the difficulty was, the
woman replied that she had been chased approximately 12 miles along Route
101, from Epping to Exeter, by a very unusual looking, disk-shaped object,
surrounded by a “halo” of bright red light. She reported that the object had
made several swooping “dives” or “passes” at her car.
Officer Bertrand attempted to calm the woman, and asked her whether she
could still see the object. She responded by pointing to what appeared to the
officer to be nothing more than a star located close to the horizon. After several
minutes of conversation with the woman, he returned to his cruiser and drove
off, not bothering to record her name.
Officer Bertrand had no way of knowing that he had just been introduced to
the first episode of what would very soon become known as the “Incident at
Exeter.” Based on subsequent events that morning, the case might better have
been titled “Incident at Kensington” (New Hampshire), since most of the
dramatic aspects of the case occurred in the latter township, located a few miles
south of Exeter.
At approximately 1:00 A.M., some thirty minutes after Officer Bertrand’s
conversation with the woman, an 18-year old man, Norman J. Muscarello, was
hitchhiking along Route 150 in Kensington, while returning from his
girlfriend’s home in Amesbury (Massachusetts), to his home in Exeter. Mr.
Muscarello had arranged to have his father pick him up in Amesbury and drive
him home, but that rendezvous had not occurred, and he was making his own
way home on foot and by catching rides with passing vehicles. As he hiked
along the roadway on Shaw’s Hill, Muscarello was alarmed by the sudden
appearance of a very bizarre looking object, which looked somewhat like a
rugby ball viewed from the side, with five very bright, pulsating red lights or
“windows” along its side. It apparently had risen out of a heavily wooded area
several hundred yards to the north of the roadway, and it proceeded to approach
Muscarello’s location, passing over a nearby field and horse corral belonging to
a Mr. Carl Dining.
In very short order, the object was hovering directly above the home of Mr.
Clyde Russell, located some fifty feet north of the roadway, where it bathed the
house and surrounding area in a “pool” of bright red light. At this time, it was
not more than 80 feet from Muscarello, who later estimated its width at
approximately 80-90 feet, considerably larger than the house located directly
below it. He also reported that the object made no sound at all.
Artist’s conception of the Exeter/Kensington UFO
Muscarello at first crouched beside a low stone fence in front of the Russell
home, hoping to be able to take cover from the bizarre object. Then, as soon as
the object had moved away from the house, he knocked on the front door,
hoping to raise its occupants. Although his pounding was heard by Mr. and
Mrs. Russell, they elected not to answer the door, thinking the individual was
possibly drunk or somehow deranged.
Muscarello then proceeded on foot west along the roadway, hoping to catch
a ride into Exeter. He was picked up by a passing motorist, who took him to the
center of Exeter, where he entered the police station at approximately 1:45 A.M.
The desk officer on duty that night was Officer Reginald “Scratch” Towland,
who later reported that Muscarello was obviously quite agitated, so much so
that his complexion was visibly pale, and he was barely able to stand. Based on
this observation, together with the young man’s story, Officer Towland radioed
the information to all units. Officer Bertrand immediately returned to the
station, picked up Muscarello, and requested that he direct the officer back to
the location where the young man had last seen the object on Shaw’s Hill.
When they first arrived at the location on Route 150, the two sat in the
cruiser for a short period of time, at first witnessing nothing. Officer Bertrand
made a radio broadcast to the police station, indicating that fact. They then
exited the cruiser and proceeded into the field adjacent to the Russell home. For
several minutes, they continued to see nothing unusual, but suddenly
Muscarello witnessed the same object rise from behind dense trees at the end of
the field, several hundred yards away. He shouted a warning to Bertrand, who
wheeled around to face the object, now in the northern sky. At that moment,
Bertrand considered drawing his service revolver to protect them both, but he
quickly changed his mind. The two ran back to the cruiser, where Bertrand
quickly radioed police headquarters about the sighting now in progress.
Within a few minutes, a second Exeter police cruiser, driven by Officer
David R. Hunt arrived at the scene. Officer Hunt sat in his cruiser, while
Bertrand and Muscarello sat in the other, and the three of them continued
watching the object move around the area for an estimated five to ten minutes.
Officer Bertrand later described how the object was capable of moving from
one area of the sky to another, accelerating and stopping faster than the
witnesses were able to track its movement visually.
All of the witnesses later reported that the object was extraordinarily bright,
and that it was painful to look at it because of its brilliance. In addition, the five
lights, or “window,” on its side would pulse, or “flash,” in a repeating
sequence, such that four were illuminated at any given moment, and the fifth
was not illuminated.
Moreover, the three agreed that the lights were so bright that it was difficult
to perceive the precise outline of the larger body, which remained indistinct to
the observers. The light formed a distinct haloeffect around the object, as well.
The bizarre object proceeded to float around the nearby field, at one time
passing within 100 feet of the three witnesses, they estimated. Slowly, it moved
away from the three observers, passing to the southeast, over the roadway, and
generally to the southeast. It passed over a tree line approximately 500 yards to
the south, and disappeared over the top of Shaw’s Hill, headed toward the New
Hampshire shoreline. As it moved away, the object appeared to rock slowly
from side to side.
Later the same morning, at approximately 3:30 A.M., Officer Hunt witnessed
what he presumed to be the same object, located at a considerable distance
from his location at the time on Route 85-101 Bypass.
Making the case even more intriguing is a report from a telephone operator
in nearby Hampton, NH. She reported receiving a call from a man calling from
a pay telephone, who urgently requested that he be connected with a local
police department. He told her that he had just been chased by a “flying
saucer.” Suddenly, before the operator could get the man’s name or identify the
pay telephone he was calling from, the line went dead. Neither the caller, nor
the pay telephone, was ever traced.
Hours after the incident on Shaw’s Hill, the Exeter Police contacted nearby
Pease Air Force Base, near Portsmouth, NH, which dispatched at least two
officers, a major and a lieutenant, to investigate. One of the officers, who gave
his name as Lt. Alan B. Brandt, was interviewed at Pease AFB by The Derry
News, shortly after the two military officers had conducted their investigation.
Lt. Brandt reported during the interview that the officers had traveled to the site
on Shaw’s Hill, and that they had interviewed both police officers involved in
the sighting, as well as Mr. Muscarello. The officer added that they had
checked the area near Shaw’s Hill, where the object presumably had been
resting on the ground, for radioactivity, but had detected none. Lt. Brandt stated
to the reporter during the interview that, whereas he had been a skeptic
regarding UFO’s prior to this case, the evidence he had witnessed related to the
Exeter case had forced him to reconsider his opinion on the matter.
Mrs. Muscarello, the mother of the witness, later reported to UFO
investigators that the officers had come to her home and asked her questions
about her son and the alleged incident. She reported that she thought the name
of one of the officers was “Brant.”
The case attracted immediate attention in the New England press, being
reported by the Manchester Union Leader, The Derry News, The Haverhill
(MA) Gazette, and perhaps by other local and regional newspapers, as well. In
addition, the case was investigated by noted UFO investigator, Raymond E.
Fowler, and by the Boston columnist, John G. Fuller, who authored the book
entitled Incident at Exeter (first published in 1966).
There are other aspects of the case that have been alleged, but which remain
unconfirmed. One of the assertions by a resident of Kensington suggested that
an officer from the U. S. Air Force had attempted to purchase all the copies of
the ManchesterUnion Leader that had a major article about the sighting. The
same source, who worked as a nurse, stated that the Hampton Police
Department had contacted the Exeter Hospital to inquire whether a man
suffering from shock might have been admitted there.
The bottom line is that the Exeter case remains as one of the best-
documented UFO encounters on record.
& PETER GEREMIA
extra-celestial Coined by a group of spiritual teachers associated with the “ET

Earth Mission,” this term denotes an ET Walk-in soul transfer which incarnates
from the Angelic Kingdom into the Human Kingdom, taking over the life of a
human being, to better serve the spiritual evolution of humanity.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
ESP (Extra-Sensory Perception) This term is used to describe a range of

non-ordinary powers and abilities which suggest the use of sensory faculties
which transcend the range and powers of the standard five physical senses. This
type of power is responsible for telepathy and the range of ET channeling, and
figures prominently in some of the more spiritually-oriented ET contacts
occurring.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
ET (extraterrestrial) This term has been used for decades (equated with
“Space Brothers” among the 1950s contactees), but was more recently
popularized by the Hollywood movie of the same name. It is broadly used to
describe individual beings and entire planetary races that originate from beyond
the confines of the physical Earth, and are generally associated with other solar
systems. ETs are linked to UFO phenomena, modern channeling, worldwide
abductions, and New Age spiritual philosophy. Individuals who may be called
“Wanderers, Walk-ins, or ET souls” are considered to be incarnated ET beings
in human form, who by voluntary agreement, have chosen to enter human
evolution to better serve planetary development. They agree also to forget and
lose their higher dimensional powers and awareness, and during their series of
human incarnations, are susceptible to all the same confusion and suffering as
non-ET souls.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Extraterrestrial Civilizations Crown Publishers, 1979). Science fact and

science fiction writer Isaac Asimov believes we are not alone, advanced
civilizations are common, but they rarely come into contact with each other
because of the vast distances between them. Using a series of variables in his
own equation to calculate the numbers of extraterrestrial civilizations, Asimov
predicts that 600 million planets in our galaxy are life-bearing, of which
530,000 have produced a technological species which still exists. If these are
spread evenly throughout the galaxy then 630 light-years separate every two
neighboring civilizations, a distance sufficiently daunting so that visits may be
out of the question.
Extraterrestrial Encounter David & Charles, 1979). British science writer
Chris Boyce believes that alien probes or databanks may already be located on
our planet or somewhere in our solar system. Sometime in the early 21st
century humankind will obtain a piece of “hard irrefutable evidence” that other
intelligent life exists, and we must begin preparing for the consequences this
contact will have on us, challenging our culture, our religions, and all of our
perceptions of ourselves as a species.
extraterrestrial hypothesis The most popular and appealing notion about

UFOs is the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), the idea that intelligent beings
from other planets are visiting Earth. To some, it is more than a hypothesis and
can best be described as a belief. To others, it is an impossibility that should not
be seriously considered. Much emotion has predominated these debates since
the late 1940s.
The ETH hinges on a long list of variables related to stellar and planetary
physics and chemistry, and evolutionary biology. Data acquired on other
planets in the solar system since the 1960s, mainly through onsite
instrumentation delivered by American and Russian space probes, have made
very dismal the prospects of extraterrestrial life in the solar system, much less
intelligent life. The Victorian image of advanced beings on Mars carefully
nurturing scarce water resources supplied by annual melting polar caps has
been totally discarded, and even the most active proponents of the ETH now
accept the fact that if UFOs represent alien intelligence, we must look
elsewhere; that is, outside the solar system to planets associated with other
stars.
The closest stellar system to our Sun is Alpha Centauri A, B, and C—a
triple-star system located 1.32 parsecs from the solar system, equivalent to 4.3
light-years or 39.6 trillion kilometers. (A light-year represents the distance
covered by electromagnetic radiation, such as light, in a one Earth-year period,
at a speed of about 300,000 kilometers per second. A light-year is thus
equivalent to almost 10 trillion kilometers, or 6.25 trillion miles.)
Moving out to a radius of about five parsecs (16.7 light-years), there are
about 40 more stars, some of which are good candidates for possessing life-
bearing planets. All of these are located in a relatively provincial region of our
Milky Way galaxy, which has been estimated to contain between 100 and 130
billion stars. So, on the surface, it would appear that the UFO problem is
resolved by the very large number of possible abodes for intelligent life in the
galaxy. Beyond our own galaxy are many millions of other galaxies, reaching
out to the edge of the observable universe. The number of potentially habitable
planets in the entire universe is almost too awesome to contemplate, and most
astronomers content themselves with speculating on the number of habitable
planets in our own Milky Way galaxy.
Several hundred galaxies are visible in this view of the universe, called the “Hubble Deep Field,”
made with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
One Rand Corporation study, for example, produced a figure of 600 million
planets in the galaxy capable of supporting intelligent life. More conservative
analyses have produced a figure of 10 million habitable planets and a figure of
4.5 million planets on which sufficient time has elapsed for life to have evolved
to intelligence, and the late Cornell University planetary astronomer Carl Sagan
calculated the number of advanced technical civilizations in the galaxy at one
million.
Astronomers have used various methods to arrive at these figures, usually
for the purpose of estimating the number of possible sources of intelligent
extraterrestrial signals. Since 1971, the study of this topic has become quite
fashionable in astronomical circles and has been labeled the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Basically, the SETI-type analyses represent
a process of elimination. Habitable planets should be affiliated with single-star
systems, like our own, as binary- or triple-star systems would usually result in
planets experiencing unstable orbits and periodically entering areas of intense
heat or cold. At least half of the stars in the galaxy are thought to actually
involve binary-, triple-, or even quadruple-star systems, and these are thus
immediately eliminated from serious consideration. In a close study of the 123
sunlike stars visible to the eye in the Northern Hemisphere (all within 85 light-
years of Earth), astronomers Helmut A. Abt and Saul Levy found that 57
percent did indeed have stellar companions.
The parent star must also be of a certain mass, and it should be in its “calm
phase,” allowing several billion years of stability for life to evolve. The mass of
the planet itself is also important, as this will result in the retention or loss of
numerous important chemical components necessary for carbon-based life. Its
mass must be greater than 0.4 but less than 2.35 that of the Earth, and, in order
to avoid overheating or overcooling, its period of rotation should be less than
four Earth days.
In making all these kinds of calculations, however, astronomers have
generally ignored important evolutionary factors, and have proceeded on the
basis that, once life begins, “intelligence” will sooner or later evolve. While
there are some good reasons for believing this, related to the increase in
physiological complexity up the phylogenetic scale observable on Earth, there
is no actual proof to support this belief.
A Miocene/Pliocene-ape lineage evolved into man only through a long
series of chance and complex environmental, morphological, and social
interactions occurring in unison at given places in given times. The probability
of similar interactions occurring in unison elsewhere is not high.
Even accepting the figure of one million civilizations proposed by Sagan,
the problems related to an extraterrestrial origin of UFOs appear, on the
surface, to be insoluble. Such civilizations would be spread randomly across
the galaxy, which is about 100,000 light-years across and 30,000 light-years
wide, and the average distances between them would be far too great for
spacecraft to cross them on such a routine basis as implied by UFO reports.
A good example of a first primitive effort is Pioneer X, launched in March
1972, which will be the first man-made object to leave the solar system and
penetrate interstellar space. At its relatively slow speed, it would take over
100,000 years for Pioneer X to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest stellar
neighbor, if it were moving in that direction, which it is not. In fact, it will take
billions of years, perhaps even more time than the age of the galaxy itself, for
Pioneer X to pass within less than 3 billion miles of another star, and the
probability of such a star harboring advanced intelligent life (at that time) is
almost absolute zero.
It is these enormous interstellar distances which are difficult to reconcile
with UFO reports, which sometimes give the impression that an operation the
size of the Normandy landings is in progress. However, there are no physical
laws prohibiting interstellar travel within human life-spans. The main obstacles,
at least in our case, appear to be financial and, as a result, engineering.
Several types of rocket propulsion systems besides the currently used
chemical ones have been proposed over the years to surmount the problem of
the vast interstellar distances: ion, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and photon.
“Ideal” photon propulsion, which would convert all of its fuel into radiation
and would have a very high exhaust velocity, has been called the most efficient,
while another proposal called for a nuclear fusion-based interstellar ramjet
which would scoop up interstellar gas as a source of energy.
Others have proposed more efficient multistage nuclear systems which
would permit travel to Alpha Centauri (4.3 light-years) in nine to fourteen years
(Earth time) utilizing a fission rocket, and six to seven years (Earth time)
utilizing a fusion rocket. Return trips (involving deceleration at Alpha
Centauri), however, would involve sixty-six years (Earth time) with a fission
rocket and twenty-nine years (Earth time) with a fusion rocket, barely within a
human life-span.
Another analysis has indicated that only photon rockets would have the
capability for really long interstellar flights, nuclear fission and fusion systems
permitting only short interstellar flights, and ion rockets being totally
inadequate.
In the late 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) proposed a fly-by
of Barnard’s star, which is believed to possess one or two planets. The BIS
concept involves a two-staged rocket, Daedalus, about 600 feet in length, which
would be ready for launch by about the year 2075. Weighing 54,000 tons, the
vehicle would accelerate up to almost one eighth the speed of light, but would
take fifty years to travel the meager 5.9 light-years to its destination.
Furthermore, Daedalus, powered by a nuclear fusion-based propulsion system,
would be an unmanned vehicle.
A major factor involving interstellar travel which is often overlooked is that
of “time dilation.” An object, such as a spaceship, traveling at a relativistic
speed (that is, close to the speed of light) would be subject to the effects
predicted by Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. The passing of time
on Earth, if it could be observed from the spaceship, would appear to be
speeded up, and the passing of time on the spaceship relative to a percipient on
Earth (or on any slower moving object) would appear to be comparatively slow.
Thus, an astronaut returning to Earth following a relativistic flight could
suddenly find that he is the same “age” as the son he left behind, or even much
younger. In fact, depending on the speed at which he traveled, and the length of
time he maintained that speed, he could find that hundreds, thousands, or even
millions of years had transpired on Earth during his absence. It is important to
note that the astronaut would not perceive time passing “slower” on the
spaceship (as, indeed, it would not be), just as we do not perceive it passing
“faster” on Earth. The astronaut would not live longer in the biological sense;
his “absolute” life-span would be unaffected. What would permit him to
survive millions of years “longer” relative to those still on “Earth time” is the
peculiar and hard-to-understand concept of relativity theory, which goes
beyond the more comprehensible laws of classical mechanics.
The Special Theory of Relativity is not just a fanciful and esoteric idea
which might or might not be valid. Like many of Einstein’s propositions, it has
withstood the test of time and has been validated in numerous ways in many
observations and experiments. Perhaps the most interesting was an experiment
conducted by the U. S. Naval Observatory in October of 1971. Four atomic
clocks were flown twice around the world (in opposite directions) at
commercial jet speeds to determine the time differences they would experience
relative to “control” clocks which remained at the observatory.
Because the clocks at the Observatory were actually moving (due to the
Earth’s rotation), Special Relativity predicted a loss of 40 (give or take 23)
nanoseconds (billionths of a second) on the eastward trip (consistent with the
Earth’s rotation), which lasted 41.2 hours, and a gain of 275 (give or take 21)
nanoseconds on the westward trip (against the Earth’s rotation), which lasted
48.6 hours. The experiment validated the prediction: On the eastward flight, the
clocks lost about 59 nanoseconds (they “aged” slower), and on the westward
flight they gained about 273 nanoseconds (they “aged” faster), thus
demonstrating the reality of time dilation.
The implications of the phenomenon of time dilation relative to interstellar
travel, and UFOs, are enormous. The following figures represent the lengths of
time a vehicle would take to reach certain destinations as perceived on Earth
relative to the lengths of time it would take as perceived on the spaceship,
assuming a constant acceleration of one Earth gravity (1g.) up to a high
relativistic speed during the first half of the flight, and a constant deceleration
of 1g. during the second half.
As can be seen, even travel to the known limits of the universe can be
accomplished within a normal human life-span. Astronauts could travel to
nearby stars, nearby galaxies, or even go “galaxy chasing,” all within fifty
years spaceship time, although billions of years could have transpired on Earth.
The main factor would be speed: so long as a high relativistic speed is attained
and maintained, all this would be possible, but if the spaceship were to
decelerate for any reason, such as to enable visitation to interesting places, the
time dilation effect would dramatically lose its potency.
The main argument which can be used against the time dilation effect for
interstellar travel, particularly in regard to possible extraterrestrial UFOs, is that
the astronauts would have to leave behind all their families and friends, never
to see them again. It is also highly questionable whether a society, however
technologically advanced, would be willing to finance such a venture when it
would have absolutely no possibility of ever knowing the results.
The same argument can be used against the SETI signal approach, in that by
the time another society received the message, the sending society may have
radically altered its “state of mind” or even ceased to exist.
To solve the “time-gap” problem in interstellar travel, Johns Hopkins
astrophysicist Richard C. Henry has proposed that the astronauts “take their
friends with them.” In other words, one could envision increasing colonization
in the vicinity of a home planet, including the hollowing out of giant asteroids,
and the eventual abandonment of the home star system and displacement across
interstellar space. That is, the entire society, or a major segment of it, would
become an interstellar one and could speed up and slow down at will, visiting
whatever planetary systems, or even galaxies, it wished, without any subgroup
experiencing time differences relative to the society as a whole.
Other techniques which could improve even further the practicality of
interstellar travel are biomagnetic levitation, suspended animation, and
prolongevity. Biomagnetic levitation would permit the human body to
withstand an acceleration much higher than 1g. to attain relativistic speeds. The
process would levitate a biological body in a strong inhomogeneous magnetic
field to compensate for acceleration inertial forces on the body and could
reduce flight duration times from years to months (spaceship time).
Suspended animation would involve slowing down all bodily life support
functions to a minimum, similar to hibernation in some mammals. Suspended
animation (which would reduce unnecessary aging even during relativistic
interstellar trips) combined with biomagnetic levitation and time dilation effects
would vastly increase practical travel distance potentials in interstellar travel.
As for prolongevity, UFOs, if interstellar in origin, could be controlled by
beings with biologically longer life-spans, or such life-spans could have been
artificially lengthened, or the aging process itself could have been eliminated.
Research in these areas is actively being conducted in the United States, and
major breakthroughs are expected within decades. Elimination of the aging
process, now believed to be within man’s grasp by many biological scientists,
would invalidate all “distance” arguments against the practicality of interstellar
travel, or the interstellar origin of UFOs.
Some have proposed that, in the course of time, extraterrestrials could also
have learned to replace more and more of their body parts with artificial parts,
as is happening with humans, until beings with more efficient and long-lasting
“bodies” have resulted. It has even been suggested that biological-based
intelligence is simply a stepping stone to a higher order of existence, first
mechanical, and then possibly “psychic,” in which no central processing system
is required at all. Such possibilities can only be speculated upon, but it should
be emphasized that extraterrestrial intelligences, if they exist, would have
enormous lead times over the human species. The statistcal probability of such
intelligences being at (or even near) man’s current stage of development is
extremely low.
All of these possibilities are also assuming that the speed of light is not
attainable or surpassable, as predicted by Einsteinian physics. Some writers
have advocated that there may be means of bypassing this Einsteinian
limitation (not necessarily invalidating it), so as to facilitate interstellar travel,
and that such could only be accomplished by a society far in advance of our
own. Carl Sagan, for example, once proposed that such supercivilizations may
have discovered “new laws of physics” to reduce time intervals in radio
communication; although, curiously, he did not propose such new laws to
reduce the times of interstellar travel.
In the 1970s, increasing interest centered on hypothetical particles named
tachyons, which would exist in a state faster than the speed of light, although
their existence has not been conclusively established. The fact is that we still
understand relatively little of the processes occurring in the universe, and
certain astrophysical phenomena have demonstrated this quite clearly.
A colorful analogy has been proposed by University of Texas theoretical
astrophysicist John Archibald Wheeler (formerly at Princeton University), who
compared our understanding of the universe to what our understanding of an
auto junkyard would be if all our knowledge of it were gained by viewing it
through a small instrument lowered by an overhead crane; one would observe
part of a dented hubcap here, a broken mirror there, but the engine would
remain usually hidden. It would thus be a very long time indeed before we
really understood the purpose of all the auto components and how they are
integrated and work together.
In the 1980s and 1990s, new theoretical thinking advanced the concept of
“wormholes.” Such proposed cosmic “tunnels” would make possible spacetime
short-cuts from one part of a galaxy to another, or even between different
galaxies in different parts of the universe. The concept is that a wormhole
would provide almost instant access by a spaceship to any desired location, and
possibly any desired time, not by crossing space in the traditional method of
classical physics, but by penetrating the fabric of spacetime in a way that is
hard for the human mind—accustomed as it is to three-dimensional space—to
understand.
The mathematics underlying the concept of wormholes is sound but
extremely complex. Although wormholes were predicted early in the century
by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, it was only in the 1980’s that the
first serious theoretical postulations were made. These were initiated by
astrophysicist Kip S. Thorne, at the California Institute of Technology, and he
and other physicists and mathematicians are continuing with such theoretical
studies. (Curiously, the idea for the initial research came from Carl Sagan, who
asked Thorne to investigate the possibility of such a transportation gateway so
that he could include it in his novel Contact, which was published in 1985 and
produced as a motion picture in 1997. In the story, Sagan’s heroine is not only
transported through a wormhole, but through a myriad of such tunnels—like a
sort of subway system of the cosmos.
Needless to say, the construction of a wormhole, or even the locating and
using of a “natural” wormhole within practical distance from the Earth, is
currently far beyond the technical capability of humans. Thorne developed a set
of nine requirements for the construction of such a wormhole, which would
require the use of “exotic matter.” However, the needed “exotic matter” would
probably have to be harvested somehow from a black hole—and it may take a
wormhole to reach a black hole within a reasonable time in the first place!
Nevertheless, it is conceivable that, at some time within the coming
centuries, humans may attain the capability to produce and utilize such
interstellar gateways for practical interstellar travel. Certainly, if such were to
occur, all the problems associated with traditional spaceflight, such as the
distances between the stars and the time it takes to traverse such distances,
would become obsolete and archaic.
It is possible that extraterrestrial civilizations, way in advance of humans
technologically, have mastered the physics and engineering that such kind of
travel would require. Under such conditions, easy travel from other parts of the
galaxy to Earth could be quite routine and commonplace. If UFOs do represent
extraterrestrial craft or devices that traverse wormholes to reach Earth, this
would help resolve the problem of the inexplicably high frequency of UFO
sighting reports.
Whether or not advanced intelligences have more fully understood the
physics still beyond our grasp, and whether they have eventually taken
advantage of the enormous energy resources available in the galaxy, are
questions of profound interest. Physicist Freeman J. Dyson, of the Institute for
Advanced Study, has written on this topic. He predicts that supercivilizations
would have taken apart planets and harnessed the complete energy output of
stars within 100,000 years of becoming technological, and that such operations
would unavoidably create waste heat in the form of infrared radiation. Star
collisions would also have been engineered throughout the galaxy, and stars
would appear grouped and organized to a point where a “tame” galaxy would
provide various forms of telltale clues. Dyson reluctantly concludes that the
proposition of a supercivilization at work in our galaxy is not supported by
observational evidence and, further, that if the galaxy contained a large number
of civilizations, at least one would have “tamed” the galaxy by now.
An even more negative conclusion has been reached by Michael H. Hart; he
states that, because no extraterrestrials have actually come to Earth for
colonization, there is “…strong evidence that we are the first civilization in our
galaxy….” A similar view has been expressed by Eric M. Jones: “The results
suggest that no technological/ space faring/colonizing civilization has arisen in
the galaxy.”
The reasons for all these negative conclusions is that a technological
civilization would have rapidly colonized or at least visited the entire galaxy,
but there is no evidence of such visitation to Earth. UFO reports are, of course,
not given serious consideration, leading some UFO proponents to regard this
approach as circular: UFOs cannot represent extraterrestrial visitation because
if extraterrestrials existed they would visit us!
A calculation by T. B. H. Kuiper and M. Morris determined that just one
technological civilization would populate the entire galaxy in a mere five
million years. As conditions for life on Earth have been suitable for at least a
billion years, the lack of such visitation can be interpreted as a lack of any
extraterrestrial civilization in the galaxy. Kuiper and Morris, however, propose
other explanations, such as purposeful noncontact, as does David W.
Schwartzman, who even supports the “UFO hypothesis.”
In considering the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, then, it should be
recognized that:
(1) there are many likely locations for the emergence of life in our galaxy, as
well as in other galaxies;
(2) the emergence of life does not necessarily imply the eventual evolution
of intelligent species;
(3) if such intelligences have evolved in the galaxy, or in other galaxies,
they have already existed as such for far longer periods than the
existence of Homo sapiens;
(4) one can only speculate over the biological, social, or technical
development of such hypothetical intelligences;
(5) average distances between stars are enormous, but factors such as
moving entire societies, time dilation, suspended animation,
biomagnetic levitation, and prolongevity, would reduce or even
eliminate the distance problem;
(6) our understanding of processes in the universe is still relatively poor, and
it is premature to decide at this time what is “possible” or what is
“impossible”;
(7) any statement categorically rejecting the hypothesis that UFOs may
represent some form of interstellar visitation is simplistic and is not
based on a critical evaluation and synthesis of all relevant factors;
(8) any acceptance of UFOs as representing extraterrestrial visitation, based
on the available evidence, can only be construed as a belief unsupported
by established facts.
The emotional commitment on the part of those speculating on the ETH,
positively or negatively, is not likely to diminish as long as UFOs continue to
be reported, and there is no indication that reports are decreasing with the
advent of a better-informed public and a more sophisticated Earth-based
technology.
The debate over the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs will probably
continue for many years to come.
—J. RICHARD GREENWELL
extraterrestrial life, history of The idea of extraterrestrial life, which dates

back at least to the ancient Greeks, has become one of the most persistent
themes of Western civilization. Nevertheless, historians of science prior to the
1980s largely ignored it, because it was not believed to constitute science or to
have any intellectually respectable history.
With a more realistic concept of the nature of science, however, historians
have now analyzed the idea in considerable detail, beginning with Steven
Dick’s Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life from
Democritus to Kant (1982). This work showed that far from being an
aberration, the idea of life on other worlds was strongly connected to major
scientific traditions, including the ancient atomist, Copernican, Cartesian, and
Newtonian world views. The Aristotelian world view strongly opposed it.
Professor Michael J. Crowe, in his volume entitled The Extraterrestrial Life
Debate, 1750-1900 (1986), showed how pervasive the idea was in religious and
intellectual discussion in the 19th century. Harvard Professor Karl Guthke
emphasized the literary aspects of the discussion in The Last Frontier:
Imagining other Worlds from the Copernican Revolution to Modern Science
Fiction (1990).
Dick’s The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life
Debate and the Limits of Science (1996), and its abridgment and update, Life on
other Worlds (1998), covered the entire scope of the debate—from the scientific
aspects of the search for life to the popular culture elements of UFOs and alien
science fiction and the implications of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
The history of the debate offers many lessons about the nature of evidence
and inference, the limits of scientific inquiry, and the differing styles among
scientists in terms of what problems they take up and how they pursue them.
Moreover, Dick argues that the idea of a universe filled with life, the
“Biological Universe” as he terms it, is the major world view of the 20th
century. As such, it has implications for all of society, and has the potential to
change our perspective on theology, philosophy and all areas of human
endeavor.
The status of extraterrestrial life as a world view comparable to the
Copernican and Darwinian world views allows one to discuss possible
implications of contact. All world views go through stages, and a rich literature
in the history of science has analyzed the reception of past scientific world
views over the short and long term and among various segments of society.
Although there are obvious differences among world views, and although
predictions cannot be made and outcomes are scenario-dependent, the cautious
use of these analogues may serve as a foundation for discussing the
implications of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
The biological universe, however, has not yet been proven—either for
microbial or intelligent life. Claims of proof in the past, ranging from the canals
of Mars to Martian meteorites and UFOs of extraterrestrial origin, have stirred
great passion precisely because so much is at stake—an entire world view with
profound implications for human destiny. Possible implications have become
part of popular culture in the form of science fiction literature and film, where
the alien theme has been one of the most dominant.
—ETEP STAFF
References
Crowe, M. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986),
Dick, S. J. Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life from Democritus to Kant
(Cambridge University Press, 1982).
________. The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of
Science (Cambridge University Press, 1996),
________. Life on other Worlds (Cambridge, 1998).
Guthke, K. S. The Last Frontier: Imagining other Worlds from the Copernican Revolution to Modern
Science Fiction (Cornell University Press, 1990).
Extraterrestrial Visitations from Prehistoric Times to the Present

(Editions J’ai Lu, 1970). Jacques Bergier makes a series of extraordinary
claims: extraterrestrials intentionally exploded a star so its radiation would kill
the dinosaurs on Earth and enable humans to evolve; beings of light bestowed
secret interplanetary knowledge on the Rosicrucians and Freemasons; at least
two million people disappear worldwide each year and many reappear with
false memories designed to puzzle the rest of us; Bigfoot, elves, fairies and
other creatures are manufactured by extraterrestrial intelligence and deposited
among us in an experiment to test our reactions; and all of human evolution is a
continuing experiment conducted by higher intelligences who have us in
cosmic quarantine.
Extraterrestrials...Where are They? (Pergamon Press, 1982) edited by Ben

Zuckerman and Michael Hart. Twenty-two essays argue that humans may be
the most advanced species in the galaxy. It is a waste of time and money to
search for radio signals, goes their argument, because even if other advanced
technological civilizations existed, they would be of such short duration that
they would have quickly given up on searching for or sending signals of their
own.
Eyes of the Sphinx, The (Berkley Books, 1996). Erich von Däniken says the
ancient Sumerians and Egyptians preserve evidence in their art of hybrid
creatures which were genetically designed by alien visitors. These creatures
included humans who were mixed with animals in ghoulish combinations,
which explains why the Olmec and Mayan cultures featured human-animal
hybrids in art representations on their temple walls.
Ezekiel’s wheel Ezekiel, who lived in the sixth century B.C., was one of the
most colorful of the Hebrew prophets. His writings are contained in the Old
Testament of the Bible. In 597 B.C., Ezekiel was among several thousand
captives carried off to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II in the first of three
captivities of the Jews. (Nebuchadnezzar II’s reign of forty-four years, from
about 605-562, marked the peak of the Chaldean or neo-Babylonian kingdom.)
The prophet Ezekiel lived among the exiles at Tel Abib on the Chebar River, or
Grand Canal, which stretched alongside the town of Nippur from Babylon to
Uruk.
It was in the fifth year of the Judean captivity, in 593 B.C., that Ezekiel
described a vivid experience that represented his call to prophesy. This account
in the first three chapters of “The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel” is generally
explained as a visionary experience while in a state of trance. Indeed, the story
has all the earmarks of a religious revelation: God, seated in a throne, descends
to Earth in a wondrous heavenly chariot; angels accompany Him; the “eyes
round about” indicate God’s all-seeing, all-knowing power. Ezekiel, according
to this interpretation, is commissioned to speak God’s word to a rebellious
nation. He is told Israel will be punished for its sins, and the warning is
emphasized on a scroll. The prophet is warned of the resistance he will meet.
After the glory of the Lord departs, Ezekiel goes to his people and sits in a daze
for a week.
Quite a different slant on Ezekiel’s experience, and a more bizarre one perhaps,
is the hypothesis that Ezekiel had a dramatic encounter with a UFO.
In spite of the weird imagery and elaborate symbolism employed by the
prophet, and in spite of the difficulty of extracting meaningful details from the
account, a thread of coherence does run through the first three chapters of the
book. When viewed in the light of the current UFO phenomenon, a surprising
tale of a biblical UFO landing and contact emerges. The description is
remarkably similar to many modern low-level encounters with UFOs.
What follows is a modern interpretation of the Book of Ezekiel, chapters 1
through 3. It is a free, imaginative interpretation and as such is purely
speculative. But it does not require much imagination to realize how a UFO
witness of the sixth century B.C. would react in the presence of an
extraterrestrial spacecraft. He would probably behave precisely the way Ezekiel
did. In fact, he might even regard the event as simply God’s way of revealing
Himself to chosen mortals. It would, of course, be extremely difficult for
Ezekiel to describe an advanced flying craft and its occupants. He would have
to use terminology and comparisons familiar to him in his day.
Thus, the prophet’s experience might translate something like this: As he sat
by the Chaldean river Chebar one day in 593 B.C., the priest Ezekiel suddenly
noticed what appeared to be a bright, fiery cloud of amber color coming out of
the north. As the “cloud” drew closer, four disk-shaped objects (“wheels”)
became visible and approached. At least one of the disks landed near where
Ezekiel stood.
All the objects had the same appearance—“the color of a beryl [greenish]”
… like “a wheel in the middle of a wheel [an outer rim encircling a round
center section]”…and “eyes round about them four (probably portholes or
windows].” Describing their maneuvers, Ezekiel said “when they went, they
went upon their four sides, and they turned not when they went.”
Four humanoid creatures traveled back and forth from the craft. At times
they were visible through a transparent dome on each disk. Though this portion
of the account is particularly difficult to decipher in terms of the UFO
phenomenon, the beings each had four “wings,” which might have been a
helicopter-like device strapped to their backs. Whatever the “wings” were, they
allowed the creatures to maneuver about rapidly (“and the living creatures ran
and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning”). The prophet also
stated: “And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of
great water...”
The beings wore shimmering, shiny garments, or spacesuits, like “burning
coals of fire,” with transparent helmets on top—“the firmament upon the
heads…was as the color of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads
above [a similar transparent dome on the craft].”
Although Ezekiel had no idea what forces propelled the mysterious
“wheels,” he linked control of the disks to the creatures: “When those [the
creatures] went, these [the wheels] went; and when those stood, these stood;
and when those were lifted up from the Earth, the wheels were lifted up over
against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”
The witness to this amazing event goes on to describe “the likeness of a
throne [pilot’s chair?]” located above (?) the ship’s dome with “the likeness…
of a man” seated in it, dressed in an amber-colored, glittering garment. Ezekiel
was so awestruck and frightened by this figure that he fell upon his face (1:28).
Ezekiel’s “wheels” as conceived by former NASA engineer Josef F. Blumrich
A voice emanating from one of the ships told him to get up and then it
proceeded to address him. It complained of attacks against him by his people
(they “hath rebelled against me”) and warned that any further provocation
would bring punishment (in our own age UFOs have been shot at from the air
and from the ground). A scroll was spread out before Ezekiel. It evidently listed
complaints against the Israelites. The witness was told to consider these
complaints carefully and deliver the message of warning to his people. Ezekiel,
according to this view, was selected as a spokesman for the space voyagers. He
was also told he would be ridiculed and scoffed at by persons who would not
believe his experience- the plight of many UFO witnesses today.
Then the amazed prophet was taken aboard (“then the spirit took me up”),
and he heard “the noise of the wheels…and a noise of a great rushing.” He was
carried to Tel Abib, where his fellow exiles were and where he sat “astonished
among them seven days.” At the end of that period he recalled more clearly
what had happened.
Ezekiel received word (telepathically?) again from the voice to “go forth
into the plain, and I will talk with thee.” This he did, and when he saw the same
figure “which I saw by the river of Chebar…I fell on my face.” Once again the
note of warning was repeated for Ezekiel to convey to his people.
The figure in his shining uniform appears again (dream?) in Chapter 8. And
in Chapter 10 the four wheels turn up once more with the figure and winged
creatures, but these repetitions may have been the handiwork of other writers
trying to improve or expand Ezekiel’s book. However, the first three chapters of
the book are believed to be the work of the prophet himself
Having no knowledge of machines or spaceships, it would be natural for
Ezekiel to assume he had been in the presence of supernatural powers. We may
never know whether his experience was, in fact, a religious vision or an
encounter with extraterrestrial visitors.
—WALTER N. WEBB
F
“Face” on Mars On July 25, 1976, as NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft orbited

Mars in search of a suitable spot for the next Viking lander, it photographed a
relatively crater-free region known as Cydonia. Strewn with rocky mesas and
devoid of dried river channels, Cydonia did not pique NASA’s interest as a
promising candidate for harboring traces of possible ancient life. However,
after the photos were released to the public, one of the many mesas seen in
#035A72 captured the national spotlight because of its striking resemblance to
a humanoid face, complete with headdress.
Section of NASA Viking photo #035A72 showing the controversial “Face” on Mars
Speculation then arose in some quarters that perhaps this 1.2-mile-wide x

1.6-mile-long structure was not a natural surface feature at all, but rather an
artificial monument. Could it have been constructed by a once-thriving Martian
civilization? Was it erected by beings from elsewhere in the galaxy during a
brief junket through our solar system, perhaps as a “calling card” for when we
became a space-faring species? Or might earthlings—from our own future—be
responsible?
Hoagland’s “City” is imagined to be in the left portion of this picture.
The person most responsible for promoting the “Face” on Mars is Richard
C. Hoagland, a gifted speaker and author of the popular 1987 book, The
Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever. Yes, a “City.” For within
frame #035A72, Hoagland and his associates thought they had discovered
evidence of, among other relics, a “fortress,” an artificial “cliff,” a “five “five-
sided pyramid” with humanoid “proportions” (its “head…apparently damaged
by explosive penetration,” pointing directly toward the more-famous “Face”),
and a collection of structures dubbed the “City Square.”
According to Hoagland, the city may date back approximately 500,000 years
to a time when, if one had stood in the middle of the City Square, “the Summer
Solstice sun would have arisen directly over the ‘Face.’”
The publisher’s foreword to Hoagland’s book describes the author as
somewhat of a science prodigy: “Richard C. Hoagland is, by career, a science
writer as well as a consultant in the fields of astronomy, planetarium curating,
and space-program education….In 1965, at the age of nineteen, [Hoagland]
became Curator (possibly the youngest in the country) of the Springfield,
Massachusetts, Museum of Science….In 1966 Hoagland served as NBC
consultant for the historic soft landing of a U.S. spacecraft on the moon
—Surveyor 1. Later he appeared on ‘The Tonight Show’ explaining the
significance of the landing to Johnny Carson….At Christmas of [1968] he was
asked to become a consultant to CBS News…and served as [a science] advisor
to Walter Cronkite.”
But in 1990, with no NASA program yet in the works to aggressively
explore Cydonia, despite Hoagland’s public proclamations about “a
groundswell of official NASA interest” in his findings, I set out to learn a bit
more about NASA’s position.
Dr. David Morrison, Chief of the Space Science Division at NASA’s Ames
Research Center, informed me that Hoagland was largely “self-educated” in
science, and that he (Morrison) knew of “no one in the scientific community, or
who is associated with the NASA Mars Science Working Group, or who is
working on Mars mission plans at such NASA centers as Ames, Johnson, or
JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory], who ascribes even the smallest credibility to
[Hoagland’s] weird ideas about Mars.” None of the other three NASA officials
responding to my inquiries knew of any interest at all in Hoagland’s claims.
Then on April 5, 1998, as part of its orbital photography mission, the Mars
Global Surveyor returned images of Cydonia taken at more than ten times the
resolution of the earlier Viking 1 pictures of 1976. Now, our new and improved
view of the “Face” reveals it to be nothing more than what NASA scientists
said it was all along: a natural feature, like many others on Mars, blown into the
dusty, rocky surface by the planet’s fierce, swirling winds.
The supposed “Face” is resolved into its true irregular features in this Mars Global Surveyor
view.
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, has Hoagland now abandoned his
“City”? Oddly, a visit to his Web site (www.enterprisemission.com) reveals just
the opposite.
—GARY P. POSNER
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952).
Science writer Martin Gardner wrote this classic—the first book to take a
skeptical, “debunking” approach to the growing belief in extraterrestrial
visitors. Most UFOs are mis-perceptions and delusions, Gardner says, and
UFO-book authors are preying upon human gullibility; particularly Major
Donald Keyhoe, Gerald Heard, and Frank Scully.
fairy lore and UFO encounters An age-old and nearly universal folk belief
alleges that a race of supernatural beings shares the Earth with humankind.
These beings are seldom seen because they live underground or are invisible. It
is further alleged that they live in some magical place, where they are numerous
and have cities, customs, and civilizations of their own. The generic term for
such a being is “fairy.”
Human contact with fairies is rare, often hazardous, and in some striking
respects can be likened to encounters with UFOs. Fairies come in all shapes
and sizes, some of them tall and beautiful while others are animallike and
monstrous. The most familiar type is shorter than human height and similar in
some respects to the humanoids associated with UFOs.
This fairy, known as “Pwca,” was drawn by a Welsh peasant with a piece of coal.
The best-known fairies belong to Ireland and other Celtic lands, but folk
traditions of diminutive supernatural beings are worldwide. In European
folklore, Germany has dwarfs while Sweden has elves and trolls. Various forms
of Jinn inhabit the Islamic world, while the Devas of India, the kappas of Japan,
and the duwende of the Philippines populate Asian folklore. The Mmoetia
appear in western Africa, while the Pygmies describe a spirit race even smaller
than themselves. The Hawaiians have legends of the Menehune, while in
American Elves John E. Roth has compiled a booklength catalogue of fairy
types in the folklore of the American Indians.
The broadest similarities between fairies and UFO occupants are their
mutual otherworld origin and possession of extraordinary powers or skills.
Fairies paralyze assailants, seem part physical and part immaterial, and impart
prophetic messages to humans. Fairies float or fly, and in some strands of
tradition sail ships through the air or climb a ladder into a cloud. A common
motif in fairy lore is the fairy mound or hill that rises up on pillars of light
during nocturnal celebrations, creating a sight very similar to a landed UFO.
Nowadays, a “fairy ring” may be considered a UFO landing spot.
Fairies may have a short stature, large head, piercing eyes, and crippled feet
or a clumsy gait—features more or less readily comparable to UFO humanoids.
Similarities in fairy and UFO lore have been treated at length by Jacques Vallée
in Passport to Magonia (1969), Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman in The
Unidentified (1975), and Hilary Evans in Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors
(1984).
An extended list of comparisons link fairy beliefs with UFO abduction
accounts. Abductee Betty Andreasson’s childhood experience of playing in the
woods when a short being emerged out of the ground, dressed in clothing like
the rough bark of a tree, describes a fairy encounter with no more
modernization than the substitution of an alien being for the supernatural. She
later visited an otherworld that had more in common with an underground
fairyland than another planet. On one trip she saw a beautiful crystalline forest;
on another she passed through a tunnel to a lush and fertile land of plentiful
light, but no sun or visible horizon. Fairyland is often underground and entered
through a tunnel, devoid of sunlight but lit by a perpetual twilight. The place is
extraordinary in its beauty, though the appearance may be sustained by magical
deception. Like fairies, alien abductors are proficient in mind control and prone
to deceive their captives.
Abducting aliens show a keen interest in reproduction by examining
genitals, harvesting eggs and sperm. They also indicate that their home planet
has lost its fertility and they somehow need humans to restore the viability of
their race. Fairies lack reproductive self-sufficiency as well. They steal human
children, take human mates, or need a human midwife to assist at a fairy birth.
One common practice is exchange of a human baby for an elderly fairy. This
changeling has a wizened look and wisdom beyond its apparent age, features
comparable with the “wise babies” described by Budd Hopkins in Intruders
(1987).
A human who meets fairies may experience the “supernatural lapse of time,”
wherein a few minutes or hours spent in fairy company translates into years or
centuries elapsed in earthly time, the sort of shocking discovery that Rip Van
Winkle made when he returned home. The time lapse of abductees is a loss of
memory rather than a loss of years, but a break in the continuity of time occurs
in both cases. Some contacts with fairies lead to gains of supernatural powers
or knowledge, while some abductees receive prophecies or acquire psychic
powers. Unfriendly fairy encounters lead to injury or insanity, while the
personalities of some abductees also deteriorate.
A mother struggles with the fairies as they try to abduct her baby.
Any recognition of the similarities between UFO lore and fairy lore must
also reckon with the extensive differences. Few fairies are hairless or large-
eyed, as so many aliens are, and no fairy drives a spaceship. Yet the parallels
between fairy kidnappings and abductions are too striking to ignore, and
suggest that fairy lore, near-death experiences, and perhaps abduction accounts
as well may stem from some subjective, psychological experience common to
all people. The basic content may be inherent in the human mind even if the
outer trappings belong to a particular time and culture.
FATE magazine Long before the paranormal was popular, FATE magazine was
publishing true reports of the strange and unknown. FATE first hit the
newsstands in the spring of 1948. Co-founded by Ray Palmer and Curtis Fuller,
the magazine’s first cover story was a feature by Kenneth Arnold as he shared
in his own words the unknown objects he saw over Mount Rainier one fateful
day in 1947.
Arnold’s sighting inspired the modern UFO era, and his story propelled the
fledgling FATE to national recognition. Ray Palmer had worked as editor of
several science fiction pulp magazines (including the venerable Amazing
Stories) and head of the fiction group at Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in the
1930s and 1940s. Curtis Fuller was also an accomplished editor. He and his
wife Mary took full control of FATE magazine in 1955, when Palmer sold his
interest in the venture. The Fullers expanded the magazine’s focus, and
increased readership to over 100,000 subscribers.
The Fullers published the magazine until 1988, when they sold it to the
present owner, Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. In his farewell editorial, Fuller
explained: “Our purpose throughout this long time has been to explore and
report honestly the strangest facts in this strange world-ones that don’t fit into
the general beliefs of the way things are.”
From personal accounts of UFOs and ghosts, to scientific examinations of
psychic phenomena and mysterious places, FATE’s main purpose continues to
be honest reporting and open discussion of strange and unexplainable events.
FATE Magazine
Address: P.O. Box 64383
St. Paul, MN 55164-0383
Web site: www.fatemag.com

Fatima (Portugal), miracle at The “miracle of Fatima,” which occurred in
Portugal in 1917, has been given acceptance by the Catholic Church as a
miraculous occurrence. However, because the series of incidents culminated
with the witnessing by fifty thousand persons of a large, silver, aerial disk,
which performed incredible maneuvers, it is also considered to be of definite
UFOlogical value. It deserves study also because numerous aspects of the
occurrence seem to parallel other outstanding UFO cases.
The village of Aljustrel, where the events took place, lies one half mile south
of Fatima, Portugal. In 1917, very few of the villagers were literate; they were
isolated from happenings of national and international interest.
In the summer of 1915, a young Aljustrel peasant girl, Lucia Abobora, and a
group of other children were herding their families’ sheep in the deserted
countryside. They viewed what they described as a white, glowing figure move
majestically three times over an adjacent valley. When Lucia, then aged eight
years, tried to tell her family about the object which “looked like someone
wrapped in a sheet,” she was ridiculed.
In 1916, Lucia was joined in her shepherdess duties by two smaller cousins,
Francisco Marto, then seven years old, and Jacinta Marto, age five. While
herding the flocks, they spent the time laughing, playing games, and listening
to Lucia tell stories.
The entry of Portugal into World War I, and the takeover of the government
by anti-Christian factions, did not disturb the pastoral serenity of the villagers’
lives. One day, while tending their sheep, the three children sought shelter from
a violent storm and were astonished to see a strange light approaching them
from the east. It stopped very near them, at the entrance of a tiny cave, and
became distinguishable as a “transparent young man,” fully human and
handsome in appearance. He introduced himself as “the Angel of Peace” and
invited them to pray with him. The children entered a trance-like state with
suspension of bodily powers, which continued for some time after the entity’s
disappearance. This same radiant being appeared twice more; after the third
visit, they were left in a state of tranquil lethargy which persisted for a week.
They kept these experiences to themselves for fear of ridicule, but their lives
and personalities subtly changed. They became more contemplative, less
boisterous, dancing and singing less than before. The war, too, began to touch
their pastoral lives with the departure of some of their male relatives for
military service.
On May 13, 1917, two tremendous flashes, like lightning, sent the three
children scurrying for shelter in an isolated area called the Cova da Iria. The
Cova was a great wooded hollow, a favorite place for grazing sheep. They were
stopped in their headlong dash by the sight of a ball of light hovering above a
small, three-foot evergreen tree. In its midst was a woman, exquisitely beautiful
but serious-faced. Everything about her—her form, face, tunic-style garment,
mantle, even a rosary dangling from her hands—seemed composed of brilliant
white light, except the edges of the mantle which glittered with a golden hue.
The ball of light in which she was encircled extended about a meter and one
half in diameter all around her.
The children felt “great joy and peace” in her presence. The Lady introduced
herself as being “from Heaven” and answered many questions put to her by the
amazed witnesses. She spoke Portuguese in low, musical tones. She asked the
children to pray for the end of the war and promised to return on the thirteenth
day of the next five successive months. Then, still enclosed in the glowing
globe, she floated off to the east, disappearing into the distance.
The children decided not to tell anyone what had occurred, but six-year-old
Jacinta could not contain her excitement, and the secret got out. Her protective
parents were impressed by the girl’s repetition of the sophisticated language the
woman had used. Francisco’s statements lent credence to the occurrence, in the
Marto family’s estimation. Lucia, however, was ridiculed and scolded,
particularly by her sharp-tongued mother.
As the children kept the dates of the Lady’s successive appearances, curious
villagers and outsiders accompanied them. The crowds became progressively
larger, more aggressive, and persistent. The children resented their interference
and made every effort to avoid them. By the third visit of the Lady to the Cova
da Iria, about twenty-five hundred curious onlookers were there, including
many wealthy persons among the poorly clad peasants. None but the children
saw or heard the apparition, but many reported hearing a sound like a very faint
voice, similar to “the buzzing of a bee.” Others noticed an odd dimming of the
noonday sun, and the top of the small tree curved and bent as if an invisible
weight was pressed upon it. Another phenomenon noted by startled witnesses
was a “small cloud” which descended upon the tiny tree at the moment the
children became entranced.
On July 13th, the Lady promised to reveal her name on October 13th and
stated that on that date a miracle would occur “so that everyone would have to
believe.” Then, according to the children, streams of light poured from her
fingers, seemingly opening the surface of the earth. A terrifying scene of fire
was revealed to the children in which were “devils… horrible and loathsome
forms of animals frightful and unknown.” The Lady told the children they were
seeing a “vision of hell.” She prophesied the ending of World War I, the rise of
Communist Russia, and a second World War. She also gave them a secret
which is said to be known only to the Pope in Rome.
Though the two younger witnesses’ family remained supportive, Lucia’s
family believed she was a hoaxer and liar. She was questioned by the village
priest, who felt Lucia was truthful, but he suspected that the apparitions might
be “the work of the devil.” This suspicion multiplied her mother’s fears, and
she began to treat her daughter badly. Lucia persisted in her belief that the Lady
was beautiful and good.
By August, the news of the apparitions had spread throughout Portugal. The
secular newspapers and magazines were generous with space and sarcastic in
interpretation. The Catholic press was characteristically cautious. The children
continued to be persecuted by crowds of persons—skeptical and devout alike—
who visited daily in their homes. The children’s lives and personalities changed
drastically. Forsaking childhood interests and games, they began to make
sacrifices, often foregoing food and drink in response to the Lady’s request to
“do penance for sinners to save them from hellfire.” Jacinta began to have
prophetic visions of a second World War, many of which were later realized.
The press continued its persecution, and, as a result, the civil authorities
entered the controversy. The children were ordered to trial on August 11, 1917,
for “disturbing the peace.” Lucia’s family forced her to face trial, hoping it
would serve as a lesson to persuade her to retract her statements. She refused to
answer questions put to her at court and ignored the cruel laughter of onlookers.
She was finally dismissed with a threat of execution if she did not reveal the
“secret” the Lady had given her and her two companions. All three children
seemed prepared to die rather than break the Lady’s confidence.
On the day of the fourth promised visit, they were furtively kidnaped by the
administrator of the Fatima district, Arturo de Oliveira Santos. After
interrogating them without success, he threw them into an illkept jail. Later he
separated them, one at a time, and told the others that they “had been boiled in
oil.” Even this desperate ploy failed. The children would not break. Defeated,
Santos took them back to Aljustrel.
Meanwhile, on August 13th, without the children being present, six
thousand witnesses at the Cova heard a low rumbling; the origin was
undetectable. They viewed a flash of light, and a small white cloud floated in
from the east, coming to rest over the little evergreen. During this series of
events, the faces and clothes of the throng were tinged with vivid, rainbow
colors.
On the thirteenth of September, a vast crowd filled the hollow of the Cova
da Iria. Among them were a few Catholic priests, who were curious about the
incidents which were causing extreme controversy in Church circles. An
eminent visitor, Monsignor João Quaresma, viewed the luminous globe which
heralded the Lady’s approach and described it later as a heavenly “carriage.”
Also present was the Reverend Dr. Manuel Nunes Formigao, noted for his
scholarship and integrity. He noted the strange dimming of the sun’s light and
the appearance of stars in some areas of the midday sky. Later, in interrogating
the children, he sought to entrap them in discrepancies and lies. He was unable
to do so and went away convinced of their truthfulness.
On October 13, 1917, the sky was covered with thick clouds and an
unrelenting rain was falling. The muddy roads leading to Aljustrel were
clogged with fifty thousand pilgrims and curiosity-seekers. Among them was
Avelino de Almeida, managing editor of O Seculo, the largest newspaper in
Lisbon. He was a skeptical, cautious man, antireligious in nature.
The children pushed their way through a sea of black umbrellas toward the
tiny tree. When a flash of light in the east heralded the beginning of the last
apparition, the crowd saw the children kneel down, entranced. Those nearest
them were struck by the radiance on their faces. Suddenly, Lucia pointed
upward and shouted: “Look at the sun!”
Looking up, the crowd saw the thick rain clouds parting like curtains at the
zenith. The rain stopped, as a huge silver disk, the apparent size of the sun,
shone at the top of the sky. It gave out as much light as the sun, but the fifty
thousand witnesses could stare at it without apparent harm to their eyes.
The disk began to “dance,” whirling rapidly like a fireworks wheel. On its
rim, a crimson tinge threw off flames, reflecting onto the throng below in all
colors of the spectrum. The disk stopped three times, then resumed its rotating
gyrations. Suddenly, it plunged in a zigzag motion toward the earth. Warmth
engulfed the vast crowd as many fell to their knees, horrified. The disk then
climbed back into the sky, in similar zigzag fashion. It quieted, then assumed
the dazzling brilliance of a normal sun.
Many in the crowd found that their rain-drenched clothing had dried in
seconds. The total phenomenon, from beginning to end, had lasted about ten
minutes.
Even the skeptical editor of O Seculo was impressed. He wrote: “It remains
for those competent to pronounce on the ‘danse macabre’ of the sun which…
has made hosannas burst from the hearts of the faithful and naturally has
impressed—as witnesses worthy of belief assure me—even freethinkers and
other persons not at all interested in religious matters.”
Two of the young witnesses, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, died in early
childhood, having prophesied their own deaths long before the actual dates.
Lucia Abobora was taken under the protection of church authorities.
Now known as Sister Maria das Dores, she has never publicly revealed the
last “secret” of the Lady. The Lady, however, identified herself to the children
as “Our Lady of the Rosary,” and, very slowly, the Catholic Church accepted
the occurrences as being of miraculous nature. Most of the specific utterances
of the Lady had definite religious significance.
Many UFO researchers and authors have considered the Aljustrel (Fatima)
events to be UFOlogical in nature, if one considers the following parallel
aspects: (1) initial skepticism and total unpreparedness of the primary
witnesses; (2) ridicule and persecution suffered by the witnesses; (3) reports of
“unearthly” entities; (4) a luminous globe which apparently acted as an aerial
vehicle; (5) sighting by secondary witnesses of unexplained meteorological
phenomena; (6) auditory phenomena of undetectable origin; (7) associated
psychic phenomena, such as healings, et cetera.
Every aspect of the children’s statements and those of secondary witnesses
have been fully and authoritatively documented by both clerical and secular
authors. It remains, however, for expert UFO researchers to document the
specifies, particularly the well-witnessed “miracle of the sun.”
A careful study of the azimuth and elevation angles might rule out the sun as
being the source of the “silver disk.” Fatima being at latitude 39.37 north, the
sun would not appear at the top of the sky or “zenith” at that date. Also,
photogrammetric analyses of available photos of the gyrating object might aid
in establishing whether or not the incident was primarily of metaphysical or
UFOlogical significance.
Since the true nature of UFOs is still a mystery, it is possible that the series
of events at Fatima were both metaphysical and UFOlogical in nature. There
may be no real conflict between the two at all.
—ANN DRUFFEL
Fawcett, George D. (b. 1929) George Fawcett is known for his many
investigative and research articles in various magazines, UFO journals, books,
and newspapers. Fawcett is also widely known for his public lectures and for
having been the founder and chief advisor to five UFO study groups: the New
England UFO Study Group(1957), the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Two-State
UFO Study Group(1965), the Florida UFO Study Group(1968), the Tar Heel
UFO Study Group(1973) and the Mutual UFO Network of North Carolina, Inc.
(1989).
George Fawcett (on the left)
He is currently an active member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON),

the J.Allen Hynek Center for UFO tudies (CUFOS), and the Fund for UFO
Research (FUFOR). He is also the author of a 1975 book entitled Quarter
Century Studies of UFOs in Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Fawcett received his B.A. degree in psychology and education from
Lynchburg (Virginia) College in 1952. He was a professional YMCA director
for twenty years and the general manager of the Maiden Times (North Carlina)
weekly newspaper. Though now retired, he has continued his UFO
investigations, and continues to write and lecture on the subject.
In 1998 Fawcett and his UFO colleague E. R. (Bob) Sabo of St. Petersburg,
Florida donated 45,000 UFO items to the rapidly expanding International UFO
Museum & Research Center at Roswell, New Mexico, where Fawcett serves as
a UFO consultant.
602 Battleground Rd.

Address: Lincolnton, NC 28092
U.S.A.
E-mail: gfawcett@conninc.com
POSITION STATEMENT: It has been my firm belief, based on my research and

investigations over the past half-century, that UFOs and their occupants, which I
have named “UFOnauts,” are both real. These non-human occupants and their
craft continue to be a part of an ever-growing global enigma.
Because of increased UFO encounters there has been a flurry of UFO
information, misinformation, and disinformation from worldwide agencies,both
from within the private and public domain.
I have found there are real objects under intelligent control being seen on the
ground and in our skies worldwide. The unknowns have varied over the
decades from 22 percent in my own civilian files, 30 percent in the University
of Colorado Condon Committee scientific studies to at least 40 percent
(recently revised) found in the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book military
investigations. This is not acceptable, no matter who is doing the investigations.
The fact that the UFOs and UFOnauts use advanced scientific devices and
extraordinary powers (reported by many trained and highly qualified witnesses)
as psychic experiences) indicates a highly developed intelligence and scientific
technology at work continues to give confirmation to my position. UFOs
continue to represent a challenge to science, religion and society.
These objects and their occupants continue to represent the highest secrecy
of any subject in American history to date. Much of this information has come
from over 36,000 documents released through Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) law suits.
The biggest question still remains what is the final purpose for these
visitations and the end result for all mankind? The future will tell. Meanwhile,
investigations and research should continue in the 147 world nations involved
with UFO experiences and proper funding should be provided for these efforts
both in the private and public domain. Special studies of the UFO repetitions
(see FAWCETT’S “REPETITIONS”) should be emphasized. And special attention
should be paid to the strange physical and chemical effects of UFOs and their
occupants on the soil in landing spots; the sensory effects upon animals; the
physiological and psychological effects on humans; and the electromagnetic (E-
M) effects on machines and instruments.
It is the complexity of the worldwide UFO phenomenon that makes
continued civilian, military and scientific investigations even more important in
the years ahead.
These unexplained phenomena continue to pose a challenge to science,
religion, the military, and society. These are challenges that must be met if we
are to survive as a civilization of the cosmos in the future.
—GEORGE D. FAWCETT
Fawcett’s “Repetitions” List prepared by veteran UFOlogist George D.

Fawcett, which he describes as aspects of sightings of unidentified flying objects
(UFOs) that have been repeated time and time again over the past forty-seven
years—which have proven themselves both persistent and consistent on a global
basis—and are a challenge to science. Any future solution to the growing
worldwide UFO enigma will have to deal directly with these UFO repetitions:
1) Sightings of unknown flying objects that demonstrate superior speeds and

intricate maneuvers beyond those of present satellites, aircraft and missiles.
2) Radar trackings of UFOs.
3) Photographs and movies of UFOs.
4) Pursuits of UFOs by planes in the skies, by ships at sea and by cars on open
highways.
5) Falls of “fragments” and “angel hair” from UFOs overhead.
6) Increases in background radiation, ground markings, changes in soil
samples, and deposits of both metallic and non-metallic residues after
UFOs have been reported in the skies or on the ground (especially
magnesium, aluminum, silicon, boron, and calcium).
7) Near-collisions, pacings and head-on passes by UFOs reported by civilian,
military and commercial pilots.
8) Physiological and psychological effects, such as electric shock, radiation
burns, dimming of vision, blackouts, temporary paralysis, headaches, blood
disorders, nightmares and dreams, reported by observers in close UFO
encounters, both in the air and on the ground.
9) Electromagnetic interference reports caused by UFOs on compasses, plane
and car motors, headlights, houselights, searchlights, radar beams, radios,
TV, power stations and other instruments and communication devices.
10) Skyquakes, explosions and sonic booms in the skies during UFO
appearances
11) Propulsion sounds and smells attributed to UFOs.
12) Landings and near-landings (hoverings) of UFOs and their occupants.
13) Hostile acts due to. UFOs (both towards and from these objects).
14) Reports of so-called “contactees” in association with “space visitors” as
occupants UFOs.
15) Straight lines of flight related to UFOs, along with their other kinematic,
geometric and luminescent characteristics.
16) Reputable sightings by scientists, astronauts, engineers, astronomers and
other trained observers of UFOs.
17) Appearances of “little men” (apparently humanoids) and other entities in
relation to worldwide UFO landings, who were reported to have taken
rocks, vegetation, soil, water, and animals, flowers, etc. Several hundred
cases of human kidnappings, abductions, physical examinations, etc.
18) Periodic cycles of increased UFO sightings every twenty-six months, five
years, and ten years in large numbers.
19) Unique shapes of UFOs, especially nocturnal lights, daylight disks, domed
saucers, cigar-shaped or rocket-shaped objects, crescents, half-globes, and
Saturn-shaped objects.
20) Revolving wheel-like machines in oceans, seas and vast masses of water
reported by ship and plane crews and passengers, and other witnesses
nearby.
21) Depressions, craters, denuded vegetation, holes, ground markings, burned
areas and landing-gear marks on the ground due to UFO landings
worldwide.
22) Power failures due to UFO appearances, both locally and on a widespread
basis.
23) Severe animal reactions reported during UFO encounters.
24) Levitations in close proximity with UFOs of persons, cars, helicopters,
trucks, garage roofs, fishing bobbers, UFO occupants, horses, etc.
25) The historical evidence of UFOs found in archaeology, cave-wall drawings,
Holy Scriptures, legends, mythology, ancient manuscripts, frescoes, and
folklore throughout the world.

To investigate any phenomenon in or outside of a laboratory requires that
they must be repeatable, and such UFO encounters are recurrent in nature
regardless of where they occur. Thus, the challenge in future scientific
investigations remains.
Future science must meet the challenge posed by these UFO repetitions
among over 140 world nations in order to solve the growing, global UFO
problem; otherwise, it will become part of the problem itself. The peoples of
the world deserve better than that.
—GEORGE D. FAWCETT
Fire Came By, The (Doubleday, 1976) John Baxter & Thomas Atkins rely on
the expeditions, researches, and the theories of Russian scientists to conclude
that a nuclear spacecraft may have caused the 1908 explosion at Tunguska in
Siberia. They base much of their evidence on purported eyewitness accounts
that a huge shining, cylindrical object had manuevered and changed directions
before falling and leveling 1,200 square miles of forest.
Fitzgerald, Randall (b. 1950) A former investigative reporter for syndicated

columnist Jack Anderson and congressional reporter for Capitol Hill News
Service, Randy Fitzgerald has twenty years’ experience as a Washington
watchdog for the American taxpayer. He has reported on public policy issues
for Reader’s Digest since 1981, becoming a staff writer and contributing editor
in 1984.
Randall Fitzgerald
The Texas native began his journalism career straight out of high school,
writing for the Tyler Morning-Telegraph. He later graduated from the
University of Texas, receiving his B.S. degree in journalism in 1974.
He was a founder and co-editor of Second Look magazine (1978-1980), later
called Frontiers of Science, and is the author of four books: The Complete Book
of Extraterrestrial Encounters (1979), Porkbarrel (1984), When Government
Goes Private (1988), and Cosmic Test Tube (1998).
P.O. Box 1536
Address: Cobb, CA 95426
U.S.A.
E-mail: rftruman@earthlink.net
POSITION STATEMENT: I consider myself an open-minded skeptic/agnostic

on the UFO issue. However, at the very least, I think the UFO phenomenon
should be considered as an evolutionary benchmark by which we can begin to
measure our potential as a species for absorbing future contact with a higher
intelligence.
Flatwoods (West Virginia) monster In modern police parlance a long-

unsolved homicide or other crime may be known as a “cold case,” a term we
might borrow for such paranormal mysteries as that of the Flatwoods Monster,
which was launched on September 12, 1952, and never completely explained.
About 7:15 P.M. on that day, at Flatwoods, a little village in the hills of West
Virginia, some youngsters were playing football on the school playground.
Suddenly they saw a fiery UFO streak across the sky and, apparently, land on a
hilltop of the nearby Bailey Fisher farm. The youths ran to the home of Mrs.
Kathleen May, who provided a flashlight and accompanied them up the hill. In
addition to Mrs. May, a local beautician, the group included her two sons,
Eddie 13, and Freddie 14, Neil Nunley 14, Gene Lemon 17, and Tommy Hyer
and Ronnie Shaver, both 10, along with Lemon’s dog.
There are myriad, often contradictory versions of what happened next, but
UFO writer Gray Barker was soon on the scene and wrote an account for Fate
magazine based on tape-recorded interviews. He found that the least emotional
account was provided by Neil Nunley, one of two youths who were in the lead
as the group hastened to the crest of the hill. Some distance ahead was a pulsing
red light. Then, suddenly, Gene Lemon saw a pair of shining animallike eyes,
and aimed the flashlight in their direction. The light revealed a towering “man-
like” figure with a round, red “face” surrounded by a “pointed, hood-like
shape.” The body was dark and seemingly colorless, but some would later say
it was green, and Mrs. May reported drape-like folds. The monster was
observed only momentarily, as suddenly it emitted a hissing sound and glided
toward the group. Lemon responded by screaming and dropping his flashlight,
whereupon everyone fled.
The group had noticed a pungent mist at the scene and afterward some were
nauseous. A few locals, then later the sheriff and a deputy (who came from
investigating a reported airplane crash), searched the site but “saw, heard and
smelled nothing.” The following day A. Lee Stewart, Jr., from the Braxton
Democrat discovered “skid marks” in the roadside field, along with an “odd,
gummy deposit”—traces attributed to the landed “saucer.” (Barker, 1953)
In his article Barker (1953) noted that “numerous people in a 20-mile radius
saw the illuminated objects in the sky at the same time,” evidently seeing
different objects or a single one “making a circuit of the area.” Barker believed
the Flatwoods incident was consistent with other reports of “flying saucers or
similar craft” and that “such a vehicle landed on the hillside, either from
necessity or to make observations.” (At this time in UFOlogical history, the
developing mythology had not yet involved alien “abductions.”)
In addition to Barker’s article and later his book (1956), accounts of the
Flatwoods incident were related by another on-site investigator, paranormal
writer Ivan T. Sanderson (1952, 1967), as well as the early UFOlogist Major
Donald E. Keyhoe (1953). More recent accounts have garbled details, with
Brookesrnith (1995), for example, incorrectly reporting five of the children as
belonging to Mrs. May, and Ritchie (1994) referring to the monster’s hoodlike
feature as a “halo,” which he compared with those in Japanese Buddhist art.
However, Jerome Clark’s The UFO Encyclopedia (1998) has a generally
factual, sensible account of the affair, appropriately termed “one of the most
bizarre UFO encounters of all time.”
THE UFO
On June 1, 2000, while on a trip that took me through Flatwoods, I was able
to stop off for an afternoon of on-site investigating. I was amused to be greeted
by a sign announcing: “Welcome to Flatwoods, Home of the Green Monster.”
Although the village has no local library, I found something even better: a real-
estate business, Country Properties, whose co-owners Betty Hallman and Laura
Green generously photocopied articles for me and telephoned residents to set
up interviews.
Johnny Lockard, 95, told me that virtually everyone who had seen the
alleged flying saucer in 1952 recognized it for what it was: a meteor. He, his
daughter Betty Jean and her husband Bill Sumpter said that the fireball had
been seen on a relatively horizontal trajectory in various states. In fact,
according to a former local newspaper editor, “There is no doubt that a meteor
of considerable proportion flashed across the heavens that Friday night since it
was visible in at least three states—Maryland, Pennsylvania and West
Virginia.” (Byrne, 1966) The meteor explanation contrasts with the fanciful
notions of Sanderson (1967). He cites several persons who each saw a single
glowing object. Although observing that “All of the objects were traveling in
the same direction and apparently at the same speed and at exactly the same
time,” he fails to draw the obvious conclusion: that there was one object, albeit
variously described. (For example, one report said the object landed on a
nearby knoll, while another described it as “disintegrating in the air with a rain
of ashes.”) Instead of suspecting that people were mistaken or that they saw a
meteor that broke apart, Sanderson asserts that “to be logical” we should
believe that “a flight of aerial machines” were “maneuvering in formation.” For
some reason the craft went out of control, with one landing, rather than
crashing, at Flatwoods, and its pilot emerged “in a space suit.” Observed, it
headed back to the spaceship which—like two others that “crashed”—soon
“vaporized.” (Sanderson, 1967)
Such airy speculations aside, according to Major Keyhoe (1953), Air Force
Intelligence reportedly sent two men in civilian clothes to Flatwoods, posing as
magazine writers, and they determined that the UFO had been a meteor that
“merely appeared to be landing when it disappeared over the hill.” That illusion
also deceived a man approximately ten miles southwest of Flatwoods, who
reported that an aircraft had gone down in flames on the side of a wooded hill.
(That was the report the sheriff had investigated, without success, before
arriving at the Flatwoods site.)
Keyhoe’s sources told him that “several astronomers” had concluded that the
UFO was indeed a meteor. As well, a staff member of the Maryland Academy
of Sciences announced that a meteor had passed over Baltimore at 7.00 P.M. on
September 12th, “traveling at a height of from 60 to 70 miles.” (Reese, 1952) It
was on a trajectory toward West Virginia, where the “saucer” was sighted
minutes later.
SPACESHIP AGROUND?
If the UFO was not a spaceship but a meteor, then how do we explain the
other elements—the pulsating light, the landing traces, the noxious smell, and,
above all, the frightening creature? Let us consider each in turn.
As the group had proceeded up the roadway that led to the hilltop, they saw
“a reddish light pulsating from dim to bright.” It was described as a “globe”
and as “a big ball of fire” (Barker, 1953) but Sanderson (1967) says they
“disagreed violently on their interpretation of this object.” We should keep in
mind that it was a distance away—an unknown distance—and that there was no
trustworthy frame of reference from which to estimate size (reported to
Sanderson as over twenty feet across).
Significantly, at the time of the incident, a local school teacher called
attention to “the light from a nearby plane beacon,” and Sanderson (1952)
conceded that there were three such beacons “in sight all the time on the
hilltop.” However, he dismissed the obvious possibility that one of these was
the source of the pulsing light because he was advocating an extraterrestrial
explanation.
But if a UFO had not landed at the site, how do we explain the supposed
landing traces? They were found at 7:00 the morning after the incident by A.
Lee Stewart, Jr., editor of The Braxton Democrat, who had visited the site the
night before. Stewart discovered two parallel “skid marks” in the tall meadow
grass, between the spot where the monster was seen and the area where the red
pulsating light was sighted. He also saw traces of “oil” or “an odd, gummy
deposit.” (Barker, 1953)
Johnny Lockard’s son, Max, describes Stewart in a word: “windy.” Max had
tried to explain to him and others the nature of the unidentified object that left
the skid marks and oily/greasy deposit, namely Max’s black, 1942 Chevrolet
pickup truck. Soon after news of the the incident had spread around Flatwoods
that evening, Max drove up the hillside to have a look around. He told me he
left the dirt road and circled through the field, but saw nothing, no monster and
no landing traces in the meadow grass.
At the time of the incident a few locals who had been skeptical that a flying
saucer had landed on the hill attributed the skid marks and oil to a farm tractor.
When several others told Gray Barker that the traces had actually been left by
Max Lockard, he recalled his old high school chum and decided to telephone
him. They had a proverbial failure to communicate and Barker—who admitted
to seeing “an opportunity to get my name in print again”—concluded that
Max’s truck had not been at the exact spot where the alleged UFO markings
were found.
Reading Barker (1956), one senses his impulse to dismiss the tractor and
pickup hypotheses and never even to consider the possibility of some other
vehicle. It is not clear that Barker ever saw the traces. He arrived one week
after the incident, and during the interim rain had obliterated the evidence. He
could find “no trace of the oil reported to have been on the ground,” and
although he saw “marks and a huge area of grass trampled down,” he conceded
that could be due to the “multitudes” that had “visited and walked over the
location.” (Barker, 1953, 1956)
Max Lockard took me to the site in his modern pickup. A locked gate across
the road prompted him to shift into four-wheel drive and take us on a cross-
country shortcut through a field, much as he had done in his search for the
reported UFO and monster nearly a half century before. He has convinced me
that he indeed left the supposedly unexplained traces. With a twinkle in my eye
posed a question: ‘Max, had you ever piloted a UFO before?’ His snffle
answered that he had not.
As to the nauseating odor, that has been variously described as a sulfurous
smell, “metallic stench,” gaslike mist, or simply a “sickening, irritating” odor.
Investigators first on the scene noticed no such smell, except for Lee Stewart
who detected it when he beat close to the ground. The effect on three of the
youths, particularly Lemon, was later to cause nausea and complaints of
irritated throats. (Barker, 1953, 1956; Sanderson, 1967; Keyhoe, 1953)
This element of the story may be overstated. Ivan Sanderson (1967),
scarcely a militant skeptic, also noticed the “strange smell in the grass” but
stated that it was “almost surely derived from a kind of grass that abounds in
the area.” He added, “We found this grass growing all over the county and it
always smelt the same, though not perhaps as strongly.” Keyhoe (1953)
reported that the Air Force investigators had concluded that “the boys’ illness
was a physical effect brought on by their fright.” Indeed Gene Lemon, the
worst affected, had seemed the most frightened; he had “shrieked with terror”
and fallen backward, dropping the flashlight, and later “appeared too greatly
terrified to talk coherently.” (Barker, 1956). As to the strange “mist” that had
accompanied the odor (Barker, 1953), that seems easily explained. Obviously it
was the beginning stage of what the sheriff subsequently noticed on his arrival,
a fog that was “settling over the hillside.” (Keyhoe, 1953)
THE CREATURE
Finally, and most significantly, there remains to be explained “’the

Flatwoods Monster,” a.k.a. “the Phantom of Flatwoods,” “the Braxton County
Monster,” “the Visitor from Outer Space,” and other appellations. (Byrne,
1966) Many candidates have been proposed, but—considering that the UFO
became an IFO, namely a meteor—the least likely one is some extraterrestrial
entity. I think we can dismiss also the notion, among the hypotheses put
forward by a local paper, that it was the effect of “vapor from a falling
meteorite that took the form of a man.” (Sanderson, 1967) Also extremely
unlikely was the eventual explanation of Mrs. May that what she had seen
“wasn’t a monster” but rather “a secret plane the government was working on.”
(Marchal, 1966) (Both she and her son Fred declined to be interviewed for my
investigation.) I agree with most previous investigators that the monster
sighting was not a hoax. The fact that the witnesses did see a meteor and
assembled on the spur of the moment to investigate makes that unlikely. So
does the fact that everyone who talked to them afterward insisted—as Max
Lockard did to me—that the eyewitnesses were genuinely frightened. Clearly,
something they saw frightened them, but what?
The group described shining “animal eyes,” and Mrs. May at first thought
they belonged to “an opossum or raccoon in the tree.”’ (Barker, 1956;
Sanderson, 1967) Locals continued to suggest some such local animal,
including “a buck deer” (Barker, 1956), but a much more credible candidate
was put forth by the unnamed Air Force investigators. According to Keyhoe
(1953), they concluded the “monster” was probably “a large owl perched on a
limb” with underbrush beneath it having “given the impression of a giant
figure” and the excited witnesses having “imagined the rest.”
I believe this generic solution is correct, but that the owl was not from the
family of atypical owls” (Strigidae, which includes the familiar great horned
owl) but the other family (Tytonidae) which comprises the barn owls. Several
elements in the witnesses’ descriptions help identify the Flatwoods creature
specifically as Tyto alba, the common barn owl, known almost worldwide.
(Collins, 1959) Consider the following evidence.
The “monster” reportedly had a “manlike shape” and stood some ten feet
tall, although Barker (1953) noted that “descriptions from the waist down are
vague; most of the seven said this part of the figure was not under view.” These
perceptions are consistent with an owl perched on a limb
Also suggestive of an owl is the description of the creature’s “face” as
“round” with “two eye-like openings” and a dark, “hood-like shape” around it
(if not the “pointed” appearance of the latter). (Barker, 1953) The barn owl has
a large head with a “ghastly,” roundish heart-shaped face, resembling “that of a
toothless, hook-nosed old woman, shrouded in a closely fitting hood” and with
an expression “that gives it a mysterious air.” (Jordan, 1952; Blanchan, 1925).
Very evidential in the case of the Flatwoods Monster is the description of its
cry as “something between a hiss and a high-pitched squeal.” (Barker, 1953)
This tallies with the startling “wild, peevish scream” or “shrill rasping hiss or
snore” of the barn owl. Indeed its “shrill, strangled scream is the; most
unbirdlike noise.” Its “weird calls” include “hissing notes, screams,” and
“guttural grunts.” (Blanchan, 1925; Peterson, 1980; Bull and Farrand, 1977;
Cloudsley-Thompson et al., 1983). The latter might explain the monster’s
accompanying “thumping or throbbing noise.” (Barker, 1953), if those sounds
were not from the flapping of wings.
Descriptions of the creature’s movement varied, being characterized as
“bobbing up and down, jumping toward the witnesses” or as moving “evenly,”
indeed “describing an arc, coming toward them, but circling at the same time.”
(Barker, 1956) Again, it had “a gliding motion as if afloat in midair.” These
movements are strongly suggestive of a bird’s flight. When accidentally
disturbed, the barn owl “makes a bewildered and erratic getaway” (Jordan,
1952)—while hissing (Blanchan, 1925)—but its flight is generally
characterized with “slow, flapping wing beats and long glides.” (Cloudsley-
Thompson et al., 1983)
According to Barker (1953): “Not all agreed that the ‘monster’ had arms,”
but “Mrs. May described it with terrible claws.” Sanderson (1967) cites the
witnesses’ observation that “the creature had small, claw-like hands that
extended in front of it,” a description consistent with a raptor (a predatory bird).
The barn owl is relatively long-legged and knock-kneed, sporting sizable claws
with sharp, curved talons that may be prominently extended. (Peterson, 1980;
Forshaw, 1998)
It is important to note that the youths and Mrs. May only glimpsed the
creature briefly—an estimated “one or a few more seconds,” and even that was
while they were frightened. Barker (1956) asks, “If Lemon dropped the
flashlight, as he claimed, how did they get an apparently longer look at the
‘monster’?” Some said the being was lighted from within (probably only the
effect of its “shining” eyes), while Nunley stated that it was illuminated by the
pulsing red light (ostensibly from the supposed UFO but probably from one of
the beacons mentioned earlier). This might also explain the “fiery orange color”
of the creature’s head (Sanderson 1967), but an alternative explanation, while
the barn owl is typically described as having a white facial disk and underparts,
in the case of the female those parts “have some darker buff or tawny color.”
(“Barn Owl” 2000)
Split-image illustration compares fanciful Flatwoods Monster (left) with the real- world creature it
most resembles, the common barn owl (right). (Drawing by Joe Nickell)
For this reason, as well as the fact that in this species (a medium-sized owl,
measuring about 14-20 inches [Peterson, 1980]) the male is typically the
smaller (Blanchan 1925), I suspect the Flatwoods creature was a female. It is
also interesting to speculate that it may not have been too late in the year for a
female to have been brooding young. That could explain why “she” did not fly
away at the first warning of intruders (given barn owls’ “excellent low-light
vision and exceptional hearing ability” [“Barn Owl” 2000]); instead, probably
hoping not to be noticed, she stood her ground until the invaders confronted her
with a flashlight, a threatening act that provoked her hissing, attack-like swoop
toward them.
Significantly, the locale where the Flatwoods Monster made its appearance
—near a large oak tree on a partially wooded hilltop overlooking a farm on the
outskirts of town—tallies with the habitat of the barn owl. Indeed, it is “'the
best known of farmland owls.” (Cloudsley-Thompson, 1983) It builds no nest,
but takes as its “favorite home” a “hollow tree.” (Blanchan, 1925) It “does not
mind the neighborhood of man” (Jordan, 1952), in fact seeking out mice and
rats from its residence in “woodlands, groves, farms, barns, towns, cliffs.”
(Peterson, 1980)
Considering all of the characteristics of the described monster, and making
small allowances for misperceptions and other distorting factors, we may
conclude (adapting an old adage) that if it looked like a barn owl, acted like a
barn owl, and hissed, then it most likely was a barn owl.
HOW MONSTERS APPEAR
It may be wondered, however, why the creature was not immediately

recognized for what it was. The answer is that, first, the witnesses were led to
expect an alien being by their sighting of a UFO that appeared to land and by
the pulsating red light and strange smell that seemed to confirm the landing.
Therefore, when they then encountered a strange creature, acting aggressively,
their fears seemed to be confirmed and they panicked.
Moreover, the group had probably never seen a barn owl up close (after all,
such birds are nocturnal) and almost certainly not under the adverse conditions
that prevailed. The brief glimpse, at night, of a being that suddenly swept at
them—coupled with its strange “ghastly” appearance and shrill frightening cry
—would have been disconcerting to virtually anyone at any time. But under the
circumstances, involving an inexperienced group primed with expectations of
extraterrestrials, the situation was a recipe for terror.
And so a spooked barn owl in turn spooked the interlopers, and a monster
was born. A “windy” newspaperman and proparanormal writers hyped the
incident, favoring sensational explanations for more prosaic ones. Such is often
the case with paranormal claims.
—JOE NICKELL
References
Barker, Gray. “The Monster and the Saucer,” Fate, January, 12-17, 1953.
________. They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (Tower Books, 1967).
“Barn Owl.” 2000. www.vetmed.auburn.edu.
Blanchan, Neltje. Birds Worth Knowing (Doubleday, 1925).
Bull, John, and Farrand, John Jr. The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds: Eastern
Region (Knopf, 1977).
Byrne, Holt.. “The Phantom of Flatwoods,” Sunday Gazette-Mail State Magazine (Charleston, W. Va.),
March 6, 1966.
Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia, second edition (Omnigraphics, 1998).
Cloudsley-Thompson, John, et al.. Nightwatch: The Natural World from Dusk to Dawn (Facts on File,
1983).
Collins, Henry Hill, Jr. Complete Field Guide to American Wildlife: East, Central and North (Harper &
Row, 1959).
Forshaw, Joseph. Encyclopedia of Birds (Academic Press, 1998).
Jordan, E. L.. Hammond’s Nature Atlas of America (C. S. Hammond & Co., 1952).
Keyhoe, Donald E. Flying Saucers from Outer Space (Henry Holt, 1953).
Marchal, Terry. “Flatwoods Revisited,” Sunday Gazette-Mail State Magazine (Charleston, W. Va.), March
6, 1966.
Peterson, Roger Tory.. A Field Guide to the Birds (Houghton Mifflin, 1980).
Reese, P. M. (1952) Cited in Sanderson, 1967.
Ritchie, David. UFO: The Definitive Guide to Unidentified Flying Objects and Related Phenomena (Facts
on File, 1994).
Sanderson, Ivan T. (1952) Typewritten report quoted in Byrne, 1966.
________. Uninvited Visitors: A Biologist Looks at UFO’s (Cowles, 1967).
“flying saucer” An expression commonly used to describe an unexplained

aerial phenomenon. The words do not always convey a just conception, since
much of what is reported is not saucer-shaped nor can it be assumed that they
are solid bodies utilizing aerodynamic principles. This particular designation
was coined on June 25, 1947, in the newsroom of the East Oregonian a
newspaper serving Pendleton, Oregon. Newsman Bill Bequette denominated
the phenomenon during an interview with private pilot Kenneth Arnold while
the flyer was relating his famous sighting of strange, “tailless aircraft,” an
episode that took place the previous afternoon over the Cascade mountains.
Some maintain that the distinctive appellation “flying saucer” was derived
solely from Arnold’s description of the undulatory flight of the things he saw,
which, he said, traveled through the air like a “flat rock” skipped along the
surface of a pond. Nonetheless, the Chicago Daily Tribune, as early as June
25th, quotes Arnold as saying the objects were “shaped like a pie plate.” Later,
when questioned carefully, Arnold insisted that the objects he spotted were
wide and flat, but none of the nine were true disks, one being crescent in
outline and the other eight having curved leading edges and pointed trailing
edges. U. S. Air Force experts rightly doubted Arnold’s ability to make out an
object’s shape at a distance of twenty-three miles, a distance Arnold claims
separated him from the flight path of the unknowns, an estimate he refused to
retract.
Since his attention was initially attracted to the swiftly moving objects by
sunlight flashing from their shiny wings as they sped through the air in an
undulating manner, Arnold’s perception of the objects may have also been
hampered significantly by the rapid dipping motion changing the intensity of
the reflected rays of the sun. It may, nevertheless, be safe to assume that the
objects Arnold saw were thin, flat, and tailless, words which do not rule out a
true disk shape.
The word “saucer” was first used to describe an unidentified aerial object in
1878, when a farmer named John Martin told the Denison, Texas, Daily News
on January 25th, that a mysterious saucer-shaped object had flown over his
property south of town.
The “flying saucer” design is actually not that modern; as early as 1918, the
science-fantasy magazine Electrical Experimenter featured a saucerlike craft on
the cover of its March edition to illustrate R. and G. Winthrop’s novelette “At
War with the Invisible.” It should also be noted that a year before the big UFO
wave of 1947, the pulp magazine Amazing Stories had an interesting fictional
illustration on its back cover showing a group of “flying saucer spaceships” in
V-formation.
—LOREN E. GROSS
Flying Saucer Occupants (Signet/NAL, 1967). Coral and Jim Lorenzen set
forth their belief that three races of alien beings are visiting Earth, but the CIA
and Air Force are probably not aware of the problem. Conspiracy theorists who
believe a cover-up exists, say this husband and wife team, exhibit a need for
“instant reassurance” which comes from a fear that no authority figures may be
in control, or even aware, that UFO visitors pose a problem for humankind.
Flying Saucers (Harvard University Press, 1953). With this book Harvard
University astrophysicist Donald Menzel became the first scientist to craft a
rational, natural phenomena explanation for UFOs in a presentation tailored to
a mainstream audience. Flying saucers are real, he says, as real as rainbows,
sundogs, mirages and other optical tricks the atmosphere plays on the human
brain. These misidentifications of natural phenomena account for both
contemporary and Biblical accounts of UFOs. Ironically, with this 1953
discussion of ancient UFO sightings, Menzel would one day claim the dubious
credit for having ushered in the spate of ancient astronaut theories and books
which flooded mainstream literature more than a decade later.
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies
(Routledge & Kegan Paul/Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959; Signet/NAL, 1969).
Psychologist Carl Jung sees UFOs as projections from the collective
unconscious of humanity and a symptom of psychic change in our species.
Jung examines the UFO phenomenon as a complement to, or the cause of,
“longlasting transformations of the collective psyche.” This psychic component
of the phenomenon Jung details in three stages or interconnections: in the first,
an “objectively real, physical process forms the basis for an accompanying
myth”; in the second, an archetype, whose specific form our collective instincts
take, creates a corresponding vision; finally, emerging with these two “causal
relationships,” we experience synchronistic behavior, the meaningful
coincidence, in which the psychic stress of humankind and the appearance of
UFOs coincide as a meaningful pattern.
Flying Saucers and the Straight-line Mystery (S.G. Phillips, 1958). Aimé
Michel, a French mathematician and engineer, recounts a wave of UFO
sightings in France which included human encounters with alien craft and
creatures. When he charted these sightings chronologically several patterns
emerged. Sightings occurring on the same day were found to be in straight lines
on maps. Aside from the extraterrestrial hypothesis, Michel wonders whether
another explanation might be that human thoughts actualized these visions in
the sky.
Flying Saucers are Real, The book (Fawcett Publications, 1950). This book
by Retired U.S. Marine Major Donald E. Keyhoe was the first ever devoted to
the flying saucer topic.
It was essentially an expanded version of Keyhoe’s seminal article for True
magazine under the same title. In this book Keyhoe states his main conclusions,
which defined the modern flying saucer era: “ (1) The Earth has been under
periodic observation from another planet, or other planets, for at least two
centuries. (2) This observation suddenly increased in 1947, following the series
of A-bomb explosions begun in 1945. (3) The observation, now intermittent, is
part of a long-range survey and will continue indefinitely. There may be some
unknown block to making contact, but it is more probable that the spacemen’s
plans are not complete.”
—RONALD D. STORY
Flying Saucers from Outer Space (Henry Holt, 1953). With this book
retired Marine Corps Major Donald E. Keyhoe became the first prominent and
outspoken conspiracy theory proponent.
He claimed that flying saucers are piloted by extraterrestrial visitors, the
U.S. Air Force is aware of the truth, it is engaged in a cover-up, and it is up to
civilian UFO groups to end this secrecy. He is also the first author to speculate
that UFOs have an electromagnetic propulsion system.
Flying Saucers Have Landed (The British Book Centre/Werner Laurie,

1953) by Desmond Leslie and George Adamski. America’s first famous
contactee, Adamski, collaborates with an Irish journalist to tell how he met a
Venusian with long sandy hair in the California desert.
Supposedly he and other beings from Venus are here on this planet to
express their displeasure with nuclear testing, a theme which soon became a
cause taken up by other contactees. Adamski hit the lecture circuit after the
book and later circulated a series of photos of Venusian spaceships which were
generally regarded as crude hoaxes.
Flying Saucers–Serious Business Lyle Stuart, 1966). Radio broadcaster

Frank Edwards wonders whether the race to the moon between America and
Russia has the ulterior motive of being the first to contact aliens based there.
He points out how the shapes of reported UFOs have been evolving over the
years from dirigibles in the late 1890s to flying disks in the 1950s to egg-
shaped craft in the 1960s.
Flying Saucers Uncensored (Cidadel Press, 1955) by Harold T. Wilkins.

Author catalogues UFO sightings and incidents over the U.K., Western Europe,
U.S., and Australia from 1947 through 1955 and speculates that extraterrestrial
visitants are possibly established in bases on the moon and other planets; a
cosmic general staff may receive reports on terrestrial affairs as well as
biological and ecological samples from Earth for purposes of study and
experimentation.
—LYNN CATOE
foo fighters The foo fighters, or “kraut balls,” as they were also called, were
first observed as very small (from a few inches to a few feet in diameter) balls
of light that followed and seemingly “teased” military fighter and bomber
aircraft during the final months of World War II. These miniature-sized UFOs
would appear alone, in pairs, or in groups, and seemed at times to be under
some kind of remote, intelligent control. They would sometimes emit a steady
glow of red, gold, or white light; other times they would blink on and off.
Although it is customary in most UFO literature to associate the foo fighters
with the beginning of the “modern” phase of the UFO phenomenon in general,
there are important differences between these and most other UFO reports. In
fact, there are good reasons to believe that the foo-ball mystery is explainable
in nonprosaic, albeit earthly, terms.
The earliest reliable report of the specterlike apparitions came from a pilot
and crew belonging to the 415th Night Fighter Squadron based at Dijon,
France. The 415th patrolled both sides of the Rhine River, north of Strasbourg,
in eastern Germany, seeking out any German planes in the area with the aid of
U. S. Army ground-based radar stations. Lieutenant Ed Schlueter (pilot),
Lieutenant Donald J. Meiers (radar observer), and Lieutenant Fred Ringwald
(intelligence officer, flying as an observer) were on such a mission on the night
of November 23, 1944, when Ringwald first spotted what appeared to be stars
off at a distance. Within a few minutes, the starlike points became orange balls
of light (eight or ten of them) “moving through the air at a terrific speed.” The
“objects” could not be picked up by radar, either ground-based or from the
plane. The lights then disappeared, reappeared farther off, and within a few
minutes vanished from view.
More reports followed, as the mystery spread to other parts of the world.
The foo fighters (a name that was picked up from the Smokey Stover comic
strip, wherein it was frequently said that “where there’s foo, there’s fire”.)
appeared also on the bombing route to Japan and over the Truk Lagoon in the
mid-Pacific. The reports were similar: speeds generally estimated at between
two hundred and five hundred miles per hour, orange, red. and white colors.
steady or blinking lights, alone or in groups, but not detectable by radar.
The consistency of these well-authenticated encounters is unlike any other
set of UFO reports. According to the Italian aircraft engineer and writer, Renato
Vesco, it is for good reason. In an article published in Argosy magazine (August
1969), Vesco writes:
Later encounters with foo-fighters led experts to assume they were
German inventions of a new order, employed to baffle radar.
How close they had come to the truth, they learned only when the war
was over and Allied Intelligence teams moved into the secret Nazi plants.
The foo-fighters seen by Allied pilots were only a minor demonstration, and
a fraction of a vast variety of methods to confuse radar and interrupt
electromagnetic currents. Work on the German antiradar Feuerball, or
fireball, had been speeded up during the fall of 1944 at a Luftwaffe
experimental center near Oberammergau, Bavaria. There, and at the
aeronautical establishment of Wiener Neustadt, the first fireballs were
produced. Later, when the Russians moved closer to Austria, the workshops
producing the fireballs were moved to the Black Forest. Fast and remote-
controlled, the fireballs, equipped with kliston tubes and operating on the
same frequency as Allied radar, could eliminate the blips from screens and
remain practically invisible to ground control.
It is also interesting to note that in one of the first published accounts of the
foo-fighter mystery, Jo Chamberlin reported in The American Legion Magazine
(December 1945) that: “The foo-fighters simply disappeared when Allied
ground forces captured the area East of the Rhine. This was known to be the
location of many German experimental stations.”
Another theory is that the foo balls might have been a type of plasma, in the
form of an electrical discharge, known as St. Elmo’s Fire. Both the Gennan
secret-weapon theory and the plasma theory have their merits, whereas an
extraterrestrial explanation seems unlikely.
—RONALD D. STORY
Fort, Charles (1874-1932). A former newspaper reporter and amateur

naturalist who, for twenty-six years, collected strange, unexplained bits of
information—including some of the earliest documented sightings of UFOs—
culled from old newspapers, magazines, and even scientific journals.
A daring mind, Fort proposed various exotic solutions to weird mysteries
ignored by science. Although Fort explored different ideas about a number of
subjects, his postulations about unexplained aerial phenomena gave him
enduring notoriety. Backed by an impressive documentary effort (some 40,000
notes), Fort’s writings have served to call attention to UFO activity that
occurred between 1801 and 1930. Fort authored five books, the earliest of
which, The Outcast Manufactures (1909), was a novel having nothing to do
with his later preoccupation with bizarre events. The other four books contain
the data and thoughts that have made Fort famous among students of the UFO
riddle. Those are: The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo!
(1931), and Wild Talents (1932). The books were limited editions, having little
public impact at the time. As for book reviewers, they were either baffled or
exhilarated by Fort’s revelations. It was the American iconoclast’s small but
influential following in literary circles that guaranteed the survival of his
writings.
Just before the United States entered World War II, Fort’s four books on the
esoteric were republished together (in 1941) in a single 1,100-page tome, a
volume that has gone through many editions and is still widely used by UFO
enthusiasts as a reference work; though close scrutiny reveals that Fort’s
documentation was not always completely accurate, the data published in his
books was not meant to be exhaustive. Considerable detail on UFO cases was
deleted in favor of clownish and clever commentary. Many UFO reports,
pinpointed by Fort, lacked extensive investigation.
Fort’s Book of the Damned is the richest of all four in UFO material. Besides
mysterious lights and objects in the atmosphere, the book contains two episodes
on a larger scale that are especially striking. There was the extraordinary
telescopic discovery of a lunar-size body close to the planet Venus, which was
observed at various times between 1645 and 1767. Astronomers called the little
world “Neith,” but, to the consternation of the experts, the orb eventually
vanished. Likewise, another smaller, spindle-shaped body was observed by
astronomers in 1762, which remained inexplicable, but was noted by Fort, who
named it “Monstrator.” To Fort, the data suggested space arks and cosmic
mother ships—vast vessels that had dropped anchor in the solar system so they
could probe closer to the abode of mankind.
After accepting the possibility that scout craft from a “super-Rome” were
coming and going in the Earth’s atmosphere, Fort soon became stumped by a
puzzle which still troubles modern-day UFO researchers. If the Earth was being
visited, why was it not done openly? This “greatest of mysteries,” (Fort’s very
words) he compared to civilized man’s contact with a primitive tribe. Would
not visitors from a superior extraterrestrial culture be eager to sell earthmen
“superwhiskeys, cast-off superfineries,” or proselytize us with “ultra-Bibles”?
he asks. Perhaps, he suggests, mankind’s hostile behavior was considered so
dangerous that possible contamination was feared, thus making the Earth a
place to be avoided, at least as far as direct contact was concerned.
Another hypothesis proposed by Fort placed the Earth under the
guardianship of some other superior beings. Unbeknownst to us, like a farmer’s
pigs, geese, or cattle (which lack the sophistication to understand they are
“owned”), man, with his own limited perceptions, does not realize that aliens
have long ago quarreled over, and eventually divided up, the cosmos, and that
our world is the property of some victorious extraterrestrial civilization, which
occasionally checks on us, chasing away all unauthorized intruders.
New Lands, Fort’s second collection of weird data, also contains a
considerable amount of UFO information. Significant sections relate events
pertaining to UFO waves in England in 1905 and 1913, and UFO waves in the
United States in 1897 and 1908-10. Giving his thousands of notes some
thought, Fort wrote that he could conceive of many kinds of extramundanians,
some of which might adapt to the conditions on Earth, although he assumed the
surface of our world would be like an ocean floor to aliens from a radically
different environment. And if such were to be the case, then that could be
another reason why such creatures do not land.
Another fascinating line of conjecture was Fort’s suggestions that many
mysterious occurrences classified as supposed psychic phenomena might
actually be due to the unrecognized antics of alien visitors. (Interestingly, the
noted Fortean investigator/author John Keel later suggested the exact reverse—
that many reports of supposed alien visitors actually represent paranormal or
psychic phenomena.)
The third work by Fort of interest to UFO buffs, Lo! is only sparsely
sprinkled with UFO accounts, with the exception of a discussion of the English
UFO waves of 1904-05 and 1908-09. Still, it contains some memorable
“Fortean” suggestions on the UFO enigma.
For example: Could alien spies be living in the major cities of Earth,
regularly reporting back to their home base on a distant world? Also, could it
be that the Earth is actually at war with extraterrestrial powers? This curious
Wellsian train of speculation he did not develop fully, nor does any sizable
amount of data justify such a suspicion. Fort did, however, play with the notion
that mysterious vanishments of ocean vessels and their crews, of which he
gives numerous examples, may have been due to wanton seizures by spacemen.
In Lo! Fort expressed concern over the lack of public interest in UFO
activity, of how people could not take such data and its implications seriously
and seemed to suffer from strong preconceptions that such things were
nonsense. Even if eyewitnesses were to number in the millions, he asserted,
UFO phenomena would be explained away, or in his own words,
“conventionalized.”
In a more humorous mood, he foresaw the possibility that even if real
creatures from Mars were to land and, with much fanfare, parade up Broadway
in New York City, disbelief would remain so great, some jokers could, after the
aliens had departed, successfully proclaim they had plotted and carried out a
grand deception.
Fort’s last book Wild Talents; has little of value UFO-wise but is laced with
more of his views of how strange data can represent “gulfs of the
unaccountable,” which the authorities “bridge with terminology.”
Although a timid man and, in general, content as an obscure author, Fort
nevertheless penned four letters to The New York Times between 1924 and
1926, trying to alert the public to the fact that craft piloted by creatures from
other worlds were patrolling the skies of Earth. He confessed in his letters that
the possibility was difficult to accept, yet when its time came, the “great
discovery” would amount to the “final perception of the obvious.” The
publication of Wild Talents took place just before Fort died on May 3, 1932. On
May 5th, Fort’s passing was reported in The New York Times. Instead of being
recognized as something of a prognosticater, the Times tagged Fort a “foe of
science,” an unfortunately distorted view of a man who, although critical of
“scientists”—when they spoke ex cathedra—was really a true proponent of the
scientific method in its purest form.
—LOREN E. GROSS
Fowler, Raymond E. (b. 1933). Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Raymond

Fowler enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1952 and served a four-year term, first
as a general radio operator and later with the USAF Security Service. In 1960,
he received his B.A. degree (magna cum laude) from Gordon College of
Liberal Arts (majoring in Bible and Greek studies) at Wehham, Massachusetts.
After twenty-five years of service, he retired early from GTE Government
Systems where he worked as task manager and senior planner for several major
weapons systems, including both the Minuteman and MX intercontinental
ballistic missiles.
Ray Fowler is a veteran UFO researcher (since 1947) and investigator. His
investigative reports have been published in Congressional hearings, military
publications, newspapers, magazines, and professional journals in the U.S.A.
and abroad. Fowler also believes himself to be a UFO-abductee.
In addition to his interest in UFOs, Fowler is an avid amateur astronomer
and teacher. In 1970, he built the Woodside Planetarium and Observatory,
where he conducts both adult and children’s shows, supplemented by
observation sessions with a 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.
Fowler has written eight books and a novel on the subject of unidentified
flying objects. In order of publication they are: UFOs: Interplanetary Visitors
(1974), The Andreasson Affair (1979), The Andreasson Affair-Phase Two
(1982), Casebook of a UFO Investigator (1981), The Melchizedek Connection
(1981), The Watchers (1990), The Allagash Abductions (1993), The Watchers II
(1993), and The Andreasson Legacy (1997).
13 Friend Court
Address: Wenham, MA 01984
U.S.A.
E-mail: eveleth@aol.com
Raymond Fowler
POSITION STATEMENT: After years of study and personal on-site

investigation of UFO reports, I am certain that there is more than ample high-
quality observational evidence from highly trained and reliable lay witnesses to
indicate that there are unidentified machinelike objects under intelligent control
operating in our atmosphere. Such evidence in some cases is supported by
anomalous physical effects upon the witnesses, electrical devices and the
environment, as well as by instrumentation such as radar and Geiger counters.
I have also come to the conclusion through investigation and personal
experience that the so-called UFO-abduction experience is supported by strong
circumstantial physical and anecdotal evidence. It has also become apparent to
me that such experiences contain (for want of a better term) “paranormal
phenomena.”
The reported objects appear to exhibit both physical and non-physical
characteristics. Radar-visual reports of UFOs indicate that they are able to
appear and disappear at a point A and then reappear at a point B with no visible
transit between these two points. UFOs sometimes behave as if they have little
or no mass: They execute right-angle turns without a curve radius and exceed
the speed of sound without causing a sonic boom.
In other instances they exhibit very little mass, as they appear to float and
bob like a cork on water, descend like a falling leaf or move with an up-and-
down motion as they encounter air resistance. At other times, however, UFOs
do exhibit mass and weight. They reflect radar waves. Bullets are reported to
ricochet off their surface. When UFOs land they physically affect the
environment and leave traces behind indicative of great weight.
The reported “entities” exhibit similar abilities to materialize and
dematerialize. They more often float rather than walk, and are able to pass
through solid walls and windows. Other paranormal abilities of UFO occupants
reported are the ability to: appear and disappear in a ball of light, communicate
by mental telepathy, exercise physical and mental control over humans, know
when humans will die, cause abductees to undergo OBEs and experiences
identical to NDEs.
Abduction research, personal and family UFO/psychic experiences have led
me to consider the possibility that UFOs are para-physical in nature and
perhaps just one of many other components of an overall metaphenomenon that
is made up of a variety of other so-called paranormal phenomena. Such
manifestations may be the reflection of a super technology, highly developed
psychic abilities or a combination of both.
This is not to say that UFOs are not visitors from another star system. It just
opens the possibility that multiple dimensions and other states of reality may
exist throughout the universe and manifest their existence to us by what we
term psychic or paranormal phenomena including UFOs. Such terms are
merely descriptive words for things that we currently do not understand.
The seeming limits of the laws of physics as applied to short-term
interstellar travel in our plane of existence may not be a limiting factor
elsewhere. We may be dealing with intelligences with the technology not only
to travel between star systems within other planes of existence, but also to
physically interface from such existences with our planet and its life-forms at
will for their own purposes.
The very fact that UFOs appear to be paraphysical in nature and have
exhibited a technology seemingly beyond the pale of science appears to be the
reason why governments have been extremely reluctant to publicly admit their
existence and capabilities. The UFO phenomenon is not predictable, and is
therefore difficult to study using the scientific method. Its ability to outperform
and neutralize our best military systems at will makes it a potential threat to
international security. Government investigations may prove the physical
existence of UFOs by radar, photographic and other types of instrumentation.
But governments may still not have answers to their origin and purpose, nor the
ability to mount a defense against them if they are hostile. Most likely
officialdom believes that if these hard truths were officially made public, it
would be very disruptive to the body politic.
Contrary to what I formally believed, I tend to agree. But, such impacts have
taken place before in human history. Painful as they have been, we have
survived. Such impacts to our belief systems are an integral part of
humankind’s intellectual and emotional evolution. Officialdom can delay but
not prevent cultural impacts caused by such disturbing truths. Thus both the
public and the civilian scientific community currently are left to fend for
themselves against official disinformation and denials of UFO existence.
Nonetheless, in spite of this current situation, no one can prevent UFO
activity nor can witnesses be prevented from sighting UFOs and reporting UFO
experiences. The results of polls taken over many years show that people have
and are being conditioned to UFO reality and to mistrust of government in
general. In the long run, it may be that no one will ever know what the UFO
phenomenon is all about, unless the powers behind the phenomenon itself
decides to overtly reveal that truth to us.
—RAYMOND E. FOWLER
Friedman, Stanton T. (b. 1934). Stanton Friedman is one of the world’s best
known UFO-ET researchers. More than four decades of study has convinced
him that “the evidence is overwhelming that the Earth is being visited by
intelligently controlled vehicles from off the Earth.”
Friedman received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in physics from the
University of Chicago, in 1955, 1956; his professional background as a nuclear
physicist includes fourteen years of industrial experience in the development of
nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, and nuclear power plants for space
and terrestrial applications.
Since 1970 Friedman has been a full-time UFO researcher and lecturer. He
is the author of two books: Crash at Corona (1992) and Top Secret/Majic
(1996), as well as numerous articles published in both professional and UFO
journals and magazines.
79 Pembroke Crescent
Fredericton,
Address:
New Brunswick,
Canada E3B 2V1
E-mail: fsphys@brunnet.net
POSITION STATEMENT: There are no good arguments to be made against the

conclusion that some UFOs are intelligently controlled vehicles from off the
Earth. Some skeptics may be well intentioned, but they are almost always
ignorant of the significant scientific data indicating UFO reality. They read the
newspapers but not the solid information. They are unaware of the myriad of
landing-trace cases the multitude of “critter” reports and earthling abductions,
the numerous large-scale scientific collections of data, the many published
scientific studies indicating that trips to nearby stars in our galactic
neighborhood are already feasible without violating the laws of physics or
invoking science fiction techniques.
Stanton Friedman
I can safely say that the “laughter curtain” has gradually been rising. Most
people are ready to listen to the scientific data, which I present at lectures, and
to agree with my conclusions. The notion that most people and most scientists
do not believe in UFOs is pure fiction concocted and repeated over and over
again by ancient academies, nay-saying newsmen, and fossilized physicists
who form a very small, but very vocal, minority full of false platitudes, illogical
reasoning, misinformation, and usually egotistical notions about their own
knowledge and importance. They are sure that if flying saucers were real, they
would know all about them, because the aliens would, of course, have already
visited with them. Since these all-important persons have not been visited,
UFOs must not be real There is every indication that the United States
Government (and other governments as well) has covered up loads of the best
cases involving data obtained by military radar and aircraft and not referred to
Project Blue Book or its equivalent overseas. Such a cover-up can be easily
understood from the viewpoint of a nationalistically oriented planet and the
search for better flying weapons delivery systems, though it does not make
much sense from an earthling viewpoint. Having spent fourteen years as a
nuclear physicist on advanced development programs, many of which were
highly classified, I can safely state that the government can keep secrets. The
whole UFO subject is a kind of “Cosmic Watergate” crying out for a Daniel
Ells-berg and/or the same media effort that went into uncovering the political
Watergate.
It is time for all of those who have studied mountain of relevant data to stop
being “closet UFOlogists” and to speak up and not hide behind “invisible
colleges” and private rather than public pronouncements. The future of the
planet many depend upon our courage as earthlings.
Fry, Daniel W. (1908-1992). Probably the most technically oriented of the

famous contactees, Dan Fry is described on his book jacket (of The White
Sands Incident, 1966) as: “an internationally known scientist, researcher and
electronics engineer who is recognized by many as the best-informed scientist
in the world on the subject of space and space travel.”
Mr. Fry described himself as “an engineer, scientist, author, and lecturer,”
who “was one of the prime movers in the Crescent Engineering and Research
Company’s liquid-fueled missile flight-testing program.” He also worked for
the Aerojet General Corporation at the White Sands Proving Grounds, where he
was “in charge of installation of instruments for missile control and guidance.”
Fry later moved to Tonopah, Arizona, the home base of his quasi-religious
organization called Understanding, Inc. (After that, he lived in Alamogordo,
New Mexico.) He also claimed to be an “ordained” minister and to hold a
Ph.D. degree from St. Andrews College of London, England.
Dan Fry’s initial contact with the “Space People” (he claimed four contacts
in all, between 1950 and 1954) allegedly occurred on July 4, 1950, near the
White Sands Proving Grounds (now Missile Range), near Las Cruces, New
Mexico, while employed by Aerojet General. Fry said he missed a bus which
would have taken him into town that night to observe the traditional fireworks
display. Thinking he would spend the evening reading, he returned to his room,
but his air conditioner failed, so he decided just to take a desert stroll and enjoy
the cool, night air.
Daniel Fry
As he was scanning the sky, he caught sight of a “disappearing” star. The

star only appeared to “blink out” because it had been eclipsed, he claims, by a
“flying saucer” (he described it as “an oblate spheroid about thirty feet in
diameter at the equator or largest part”). The “saucer” supposedly settled to the
ground about seventy feet away, whereupon he approached to investigate the
surface of the highly polished metal. He was startled to hear a deep voice,
which he claims came out of the air beside him, which said, “Better not touch
the hull, pal. It’s still hot!” He was so taken aback by this, he says, that he
caught his foot against a root sticking out of the ground and fell over onto the
desert sand. Then, a chuckle filled the air as the invisible voice supposedly
spoke again: “Take it easy, pal. You are among friends.”
After a little introductory chat, Fry claims to have learned that he was
talking to an invisible spaceman named Alan. The spaceman explained some of
the technicalities of the spacecraft’s operation, and then took Fry on a quick
flight to New York City and back to White Sands—a trip which lasted only
thirty minutes (flying at a speed of 8,000 miles per hour).
The Space People who contacted Fry were said to be the descendants of a
past supercivilization on Earth, which was annihilated in an atomic war more
than thirty thousand years ago. According to Alan, the Saucerians’ ancestors
were originally from the legendary Lemuria, which was in scientific
competition with the ancient civilization of Atlantis. These two nations
eventually destroyed each other, except for a few survivors who were able to
escape in four aerial craft capable of space travel. One ship was lost along the
way; but three landed safely on the, planet Mars, where the survivors
established a new society. Later, they became independent of planets altogether,
and began living aboard huge, self-sustaining ships that float through space in
whatever direction the people choose, somewhat like the imaginary floating
island fictionalized by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels.
According to the skeptic-UFOlogist Philip J. Klass, who did some checking
on the matter, Fry’s doctoral degree was obtained from “a sort of
correspondence school” operated by a small church, from which it is possible
for virtually anyone to be granted a Ph.D. by merely submitting a ten thousand-
word thesis and paying a standard fee.
Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of the U.S. Air Force Project Blue
Book, also had this to say: “He [Fry] hadn’t told the Air Force about his ride
before because he was afraid he’d lose his job. But, at the press conference, he
did plug his new book, The White Sands Incident. By this time Adamski had
already published his book Flying Saucers Have Landed and it looked as if Fry
was going to cut him out. But Fry took a lie-detector test on a widely viewed
West Coast television show and flunked it flat.” (Ruppelt, 1956).
However, if we are looking for meaning when we study the contactees, does
it really matter if the alleged contacts are literally true? Let us consider the
story about the war between the Lemurians and Atlanteans as a parable, or
metaphor, demonstrating what consequences we can expect when competition
is not balanced with cooperation. When you read The White Sands Incident
carefully for its meaning, it is hard to miss. The spaceman, Alan, uses a series
of metaphors to trace the different phases of human civilization, beginning with
“the symbol of the tree and the serpent,” and culminating in our present-day
situation.
Photo taken by Fry at Merlin, Oregon, in 1964
“The tree is almost always the symbol of life,” says Alan, “beginning in the
sea, rising to the atmosphere, and finally into space. There is another factor
which may, perhaps, have some significance. Your people and some of mine,
including myself, have, at least in part, a common ancestry.” This is where Alan
relates the story of the rival between the two factions, represented by Lemuria
and Atlantis. He applies the parable directly to us when he states that: “Unless
some small balancing force is applied in the right quarters, your entire
civilization may wipe itself out in a planet wide holocaust before we are in a
position to be of assistance.” He adds: “…man can improve the conditions of
his life only through cooperation.”
According to the psychologist Carl Jung, the UFO (or space ship)
represented the higher Self. It is usually in the shape of a mandala (or magic
circle), which universally symbolizes order and perfection. Thus the
independent, free-floating space ships—mentioned in all of the contactee
accounts—clearly symbolize the perfect, self-reliant, individuated psyche: the
ideal to which all humans seeking wisdom aspire. It is also the ideal that is
required for survival; hence, the warning.
In the same manner that the technological gods and angels reside inside the
self-sustaining space ships, the “kingdom of heaven” resides within each of us,
just as Jesus said. In every case, the contactee is given a tour of the ship—
which, of course, means looking inward at the elements that make up the
psyche and realizing the virtually unlimited potential that exists within us, once
we tap into nature’s forces. The personal message is that when we take control
of our own “ship,” we have all the power we need, and we become the cure for
whatever ails us. When Alan says “Every aspect of our environment is
precisely controlled within our ships,” he is really talking about human
potential and self-actualization. When you read Fry’s original account, the
metaphor becomes richer and more obvious with every sentence.
Fry was informed that he was specially chosen to be the liaison between
planet Earth and the Galactic Confederation. “One of the purposes of this visit,”
Alan told him, “is to determine the basic adaptability of the Earth’s peoples,
particularly your ability to adjust your minds quickly to conditions and
concepts completely foreign to your customary modes of thought. Previous
expeditions by our ancestors, over a period of many centuries, met with almost
total failure in this respect. This time there is hope that we may find minds
somewhat more receptive so that we may assist you in the progress, or at least
in the continued existence of your race.” (Fry, 1973)
Alan made the most important point of all when he said: “Actually, the
possibility of atomic warfare on your planet, while it is an immediate danger, is
not the basic problem, it is merely a symptom, and few illnesses can be cured
by treating only the symptoms.” He then explained how material science and
social science are perfectly good in themselves, but must be based on a
foundation of “spiritual science which deals with the relationship between man
and the great creative power and infinite intelligence which pervades and
controls all nature, and which your people refer to as God.” (Fry, 1973).
That is one of the main differences between man and the other animals: “the
animal has no spiritual or social science”; whereas “Mankind…is endowed
with the innate realization of the infinite intelligence and the creative power of
the supreme mind, even though he may not yet be able to understand.” (Fry,
1973)
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Fry, Daniel W. The White Sands Incident (New Age Publishing, 1954; Best Books, 1966).
———. To Men of Earth, including The White Sands Incident (Merlin Publishing Co., 1973),
Gibbons, Gavin. They Rode in Space Ships (The Citadel Press, 1957).
Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Doubleday, 1956).
Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) Founded in 1979, the Fund for UFO
Research is a nonprofit corporation that raises money and issues grants for
selected UFO investigation and publication projects.
Until 1993, FUFOR was headed by Bruce Maccabee, followed by Richard
Hall from 1993 through 1997. Since 1998, Don Berliner has served as
chairman.
FUFOR has supported investigations into the Wellington/Kaikoura, New
Zealand, film, the UFO abduction phenomenon, the “Majestic 12” (MJ-12)
documents, and many other UFO-related incidents.
To receive a grant from FUFOR, a proposal must be approved by a majority
of the national board.
P.O. Box 277

Address: Mt. Rainier, MD 20712
U.S.A.
Web site: www.fufor.org
Reference
Clark, Jerome. The UFO Encyclopedia (Omnigraphics, 1998).
G
Galactic Club, The (W.H. Freeman, 1974). Australian astrophysicist Ronald

Bracewell sounds the first pessimistic note in science books about the prospect
of contacting an advanced civilization using radio telescopes. There is only one
chance in a thousand that radio signals will come our way and only one chance
in a thousand that one of our radio telescopes will be pointed the right way when
the signal arrives. He proposes instead that first contact will come as a result of
our detection of an interstellar space probe sent to contact us. “It is quite
possible,” he writes, that such a space probe, or messenger, has already arrived
in our solar system and is even now monitoring us
Galicia UFO wave of 1995-1996 What would prove to be one of the best-
documented UFO “flaps” of the decade began on November 28, 1995 in
Galicia (the autonomous region occupying Spain’s northwestern corner), when
the security cameras of the As Gándaras military facility captured several
UFOs on film, causing concern among the Spanish military.
The media soon learned that soccer players at a nearby field had also seen
the mysterious objects. UFOlogist Marcelino Requejo was quick to stress that
the As Gándaras sighting was by no means an isolated incident, and that “a
veritable flood of sightings” was taking place in the region, coinciding with
seismic disturbances—approximately 70 in that month alone.
The UFOlogist’s prediction would come true in January 1996, when
sightings multiplied throughout northern Spain. Citizens of Pedrona
(Santander) were treated to the passing of a brightly-lit oval object over their
town. The coastal city of Gijón reported a UFO hanging over the sea at night—
its multicolored lights dispelling the darkness. In the Galician village of As
Pontes, cameraman Bartolomé Vázquez filmed the maneuvers of a triangular
UFO which he described as an “upside down steam iron.” This episode was
considered to be one of the most significant, given that the cameraman had
managed to capture two jet fighters in pursuit of the slow-moving triangle. Yet
the most spectacular one occurred at Monforte de Lemos, where a local camera
crew filmed hundreds of witnesses absorbed in contemplation of a massive oval
UFO which remained suspended overhead for an hour. Other television crews
filmed UFO maneuvers over sensitive locations like the ENDESA
thermoelectric plant at As Pontes.
The phenomenon entered its proactive phase on February 26, 1996, when
motorist Andrés Landeira, driving at night toward the city of Lugo, found that
his car was being drawn upward by an unknown force. In a panic, Landeira
opened the car’s door to jump out, but found he was at least thirty feet above
the ground. He would later tell UFO invesigator Manuel Carballal, “I forced
myself back into the driver’s seat and thought I was going to die, being taken to
God knows where...” However, the force that picked up the car deposited it
further along the road, but in a sideways manner.
Like the classic UFO flaps of earlier decades, the Galician wave followed
the classic pattern of sightings, ground effects, and occupant encounters. On
February 18, 1996, two children playing in the woods outside Entrimo reported
seeing a trio of luminous spheres which merged to form “a pair of saucers on
top of each other” before vanishing. The youngsters also claimed having found
clearly non-human footprints upon returning the next day; investigators
ascertained that the marks corresponded to a creature standing at least 7 feet
tall.
On March 7, 1996, José Manuel Castro, a rancher from the town of
Ferrerías, saw a UFO land on his property a mere 100 feet away from his
house. Small creatures “looking like monkeys” emerged from the object, and
the vehicle left surface impressions and footprints similar to those found at
Entrimo.
—SCOTT CORRALES
Garden Grove (California) abduction hoax The 1975 Garden Grove,

California, abduction was the most spectacular CE-3 of its time. A 33-year-old
man (let’s call him “BS”) gave the following story in eight weekly videotaped
hypnosis sessions with Dr. W.C. McCall.
BS and a friend were camping in the Arizona desert in 1971 when suddenly
a weird beam descended slowly and lifted them aboard a UFO where ugly 7-
foot reptilian entities stripped them naked. Two entities took BS and floated
down a curving hallway, through an exploding door and into a brightly lit
room.
As two creatures fidgeted in boredom at their consoles, BS stood against a
wall and was given a lightning-quick physical exam. Two beams shot at him;
one held his eyes in a fixed gaze and the other probed his body from his feet
up: he sensed he was bleeding, he urinated, liquid drained from his stomach, his
chest opened as his heart left his body briefly, and in a dizzying moment he saw
his brain travel up the beam and back.
Then everything stopped and from across the room an alien like the others
but 9 feet tall glided toward him, smelling foul and with bad breath as well. BS
was terrified but when the monster’s scaly hand touched his head he was
instantly calmed. The tall alien gave him a tour of the ship. BS learned that the
aliens were clones created by a central intelligence called the Host, in the form
of a giant computer (and also as a fetal humanoid) on the UFO’s upper floor.
There he also saw a vast birth laboratory—row after row of clear cylinders with
writhing alien embryos in liquid. The aliens were “checking the original
biological plantation” on Earth.
BS was returned down the curving hall to his pal and they were dressed and
beamed to the ground, and the UFO disappeared. He had been onboard about
two hours.
BS’s weekly regressions kept a group of local UFOlogists gasping. In the
fourth week BS reported that he had been visited at night in his garage
workroom by a ball of light that became a fetal humanoid. In the seventh week
BS disappeared. Police were notified, but BS turned up 24 hours later,
unshaven and woozy, wearing only his shorts. Hypnotized, he claimed that he
had been abducted by a UFO and taken to Peru where he underwent a ritual
with the aliens at the site of the famous spider figure on the Nazca Plain. BS
said his first CE-3 was at 16, when he was forced by aliens to give himself a
tattoo on his right forearm in the shape of the Nazca spider—spectacular
physical evidence, if true.
The Garden Grove case ultimately involved six alleged abductions
(unprecedented in 1975), two with separate second witnesses, and loads of data
channeled during BS’s daily self-hypnosis sessions, including blueprints of the
UFO (BS was a draftsman, though otherwise unschooled); chemical formulae
for the craft’s propulsion system (with atomic weights of elements to four
decimal places); texts of a mysterious computer-like alien language; and a brief
message from the aliens written in pre-Homeric Greek (ca. 3500 years ago),
“Nous laos hikano.” BS gave us a loose translation: “I come in the mind of
man.”
Unbelievably, perhaps, BS’s case seemed believable to McCall and me. But
after several weeks of hypnosis, videotaping, and laborious analysis of his
narratives, we caught BS in a hoax. He claimed to have found a spider figure
drawn on the ground at the site of a reported UFO sighting, but a young boy
had seen BS scratching it in the dirt himself.
Then—belatedly—we looked into BS’s personal life and found disturbing
facts. He worked for a computer manufacturer (bye-bye to the alien computer
motif). At work he had access to both a technical library (adios to the atomic
weights) and books by Erich von Däniken (ta-ta to the Nazca Plain, the
biological plantation, etc.). One of his friends at work was a Greek scholar.
Neither of two alleged second witnesses would verify BS’s claims (all
fabrications). Finally, we learned that BS had once served prison time for fraud.
He had glib excuses for his actions but we stopped working with him.
How were a medical doctor and a college professor flim-flammed by a fable
that in another context few people with an IQ higher than a coat of floor wax
might believe? In our defense, BS’s sessions were convincing in the extreme.
He had an Irishman’s gift for blarney, a con man’s cunning, and a draftsman’s
eye for specific details. As a clincher, there were surprise factors in his sessions
—such as the clinically plausible hitech exam, the ghastly birth lab, and his
mention of alien ennui—that electrified us because we naively assumed they
were beyond his powers of invention. BS’s case remains one of the most
persuasively detailed CE-3s ever, and though it made monkeys out of us for a
while, chances are that it would have done the same to many of the intelligent
life forms in the galaxy.
BS deceived us just as decades of supposedly real CE-3 yarns before and since
have duped other investigators—who rarely discuss hoaxers. BS’s hoax worked
because we wanted to believe him, and we were seduced by his ability to spin an
appealing saga. Our inadequacies were those that have afflicted the spotty
history of abduction investigations from the beginning.
The Garden Grove hoax is unusual in that we compiled a complete
audiovisual and written record of a CE-3 hoaxer’s regressions, from acceptance
to exposure. Also, our somewhat humbled perseverance ultimately solved a
complex case without media sensationalism. More important, we began to
make sense of its wealth of birth imagery, which we found was common in
other supposedly real and known-to-be-imaginary cases. (See BIRTH MEMORIES
HYPOTHESIS)
In retrospect, our first CE-3 case was a stumble that we made into a giant
leap: BS hoaxed us into permanent skepticism about CE-3 claims. Now I think
of him as our first Imaginary Abductee. Like the subjects of that 1977 study,
BS fabricated a typical and perinatally rich CE-3 narrative out of his own fertile
fantasy. His case establishes that hoaxers, Imaginaries, and allegedly real
abductees have more in common than proponents are likely to acknowledge.
(See also IMAGINARY ABDUCTEE STUDY)
—ALVIN H. LAWSON
geomagnetic explanations for UFOs Dr. Michael Persinger, a

neuropsychologist at Laurentian University in Canada, has conducted and
published hundreds of studies showing how magnetic fields can produce UFO-
like visions as well as hallucinations of saucers, “Grays,” and abductions in
people subjected to the fields in a controlled laboratory setting. Beginning his
research in the early 1970s, Persinger initially showed that UFO reports were
statistically correlated with seismic (earthquake) activity. His results showed
that increased reports of UFOs come at times when seismic activity is low or
stable.
Working with geologist John Derr and others, Persinger speculated that the
tectonic stress that builds between earthquakes produces powerful geomagnetic
fields. These fields, it was hypothesized, somehow affected the areas in the
brain that can produce hallucinatory phenomena. One related line of
speculation has asserted that plasmas are produced by a building tectonic strain
in the Earth’s surface, thus creating powerful but localized geomagnetic fields.
Plasmas—balls of charged air particles—are not speculative phenomena, and
have been produced in laboratory settings. The piezoelectric effect, the
production of electricity when a crystal is pressured or crushed—is often
theorized to be the source of plasma energies that can emerge from the Earth. In
addition, plasmas are believed to be related to “earthquake lights” as well as
lights observed at volcanic sites. Greg Long’s 1990 book, Examining the
Earthlight Theory: The Yakima UFO Microcosm does an admirable job of
showing how a 1970s UFO flap on the Yakima, Washington, reservation was
probably caused by tectonic strain on a ridge in the reservation covered with
over 100 earthquake fault lines. The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 is
hypothesized as relieving the building tectonic strain in the region, thus
accounting for the sudden cessation of UFO reports in UFO reports in the area
after the pressure was relieved. Another investigator, Paul Devereux, has long
theorized that charged balls of light coming from the Earth produce mental and
physical phenomena in people who come close enough to observe the lights.
Persinger’s more recent research has focused on identifying specific brain
sites and specific magnetic frequencies that can produce a host of phenomena.
For example, magnetic fields focused on the temporal lobe can create visions of
various types. Research shows that different magnetic frequencies focused on
various brain areas can, in fact, literally create abduction-like experiences as
well as visions of saucers, angels, and apparitions. Persinger has speculated that
“haunted” sites and places where long-term phenomena occur are situated on
an area of the Earth’s surface where plasma energy is regularly released.
The influence of magnetic fields and frequencies on human behavior is
under intense investigation in laboratories across the globe. Military and
medical applications are both being investigated. Publication of results from
this vast arena of research does occur routinely, however the scientific journals
disseminating studies are highly technical and sometimes obscure. Major
university research libraries and government repositories generally carry these
technical journals. The amount of research being conducted in this area is
staggering. For example, the Harvard University Genetics Department supplied
this writer with a bibliography of 3,000 published studies in 1995.
Exactly how magnetic fields can produce mental phenomena is also
becoming known. In 1992, the mineral magnetite was discovered in human
brain cells. In the presence of a magnetic field, the magnetite in brain cells
aligns itself with the field and begins to resonate (vibrate). As it resonates, ion
channels on the surface of brain cells open allowing the passage of specific ions
that result in the release of neurotransmitters. This produces imagery and other
experiences. The textbook Psychopharmacology (Little, 1997) and Grand
Illusions (Little, 1994) both summarize this process.
Related to the geomagnetic explanation of UFOs is the proposal that
electromagnetic pollution accounts for increased paranormal phenomena.
Albert Budden’s Electric UFOs (1998) and Allergies and Aliens (1994) assert
that electromagnetic pollution created by microwaves, transmission lines, and
modern society’s proliferation of electronics has created a cesspool of magnetic
pollution. Budden proposes that this bombardment of electromagnetic energy
alters brain chemistry through its influence on brain magnetite. Hauntings,
abductions, missing time, and paranormal experiences result from this
influence. A more speculative but all-encompassing theory invoking
geomagnetic energy is that proposed by Greg Little. (See also GEOMAGNETIC
INTELLIGENT ENERGY THEORY OF UFOS)
References
Little, Gregory L. Grand Illusions (White Buffalo Books, 1994).
———. Psychopharmacology (White Buffalo Books, 1997).
Long, Greg. Examining the Earthlight Theory: The Yakima UFO Microcosm (CUFOS, 1990).
geomagnetic intelligent energy theory of UFOs Building from the works

of John Keel and Carl Jung as well as from geomagnetic research and
neurochemistry, the present writer has theorized that the plasma energies
produced by the Earth represent Carl Jung’s archetypes manifesting in physical
reality. This form of archetypal manifestation can be described as intelligent
geomagnetic energy forms.
The theory begins by proposing that the electromagnetic energy (EM)
spectrum is the abode of Jung’s archetypes (as Jung himself stated). The EM
spectrum is sometimes referred to as forming the fences that hold physical
reality together. The entire universe is bathed in constant pulses of EM energy.
The human visual system is capable of perceiving less than 5 percent of the EM
spectrum. The remaining 95 percent of reality is there—all around us—but
unseen. A perusal of a basic text in psychology or physics will explain the EM
spectrum in more detail.
As proposed by Jung through his concept of archetypes and John Keel with
his idea of “ultraterrestrials,” the intelligent energy theory proposes that UFOs,
abductions, apparitional, and various other psychic phenomena are produced
when the intelligent energy forms residing on the unseen ends of the EM
spectrum manifest in physical reality.
Jung wrote in several places that angels were archetypal forms that could
manifest into reality. This process has long been termed transmutation by
occultists and occurs by an alteration of the energy form’s vibrational frequency
into the narrow band of the EM spectrum perceived by the human visual
system. As such, these manifestations have also been termed “spectral
intrusions.”
The theory accounts for a wide range of ancient reports. For example, in
Zechariah 5:2, a flying tube 30 feet by 15 feet is described as a permanent curse
of the Earth judging the deeds of men. In Zechiariah 5:6 he is shown an object
the size of a bushel basket moving through the Earth. He is told that the object
collects the wicked thoughts of men. Zech. 4:6-10 describes lamp-shaped
objects that run “to and fro” everywhere on the Earth. These are the “eyes of
God” that record everything that occurs on Earth. These “collection” devices
are normally unseen but are living beings as described by the angel who
showed them to the ancient prophet.
The Hebrew Book of Enoch (translated in 1928) also contains numerous
descriptions of devices used by “angels” in their work. These flying objects are
described as “pipes,” orbs, and tubes. They not only record events on Earth but
are used by the Watchers (fallen angels) to literally contain the souls of evil
people after death. The souls of these people are then taken to the “gates of
hell” where they are pushed out the tubes into hell. This ancient religious text
(3 Enoch) describes the fallen angels who control these collection devices as
gray in color, short like children, and having a partial human-like appearance.
The geomagnetic intelligent energy theory proposes that the EM spectrum is
the spiritual world. The intelligent beings residing on the unseen ends of the
EM spectrum can, under some conditions, come into physical reality when their
frequency comes into the visible frequency range. The powerful EM fields
constantly produced by the Earth (and the Sun) provide an energy source for
the EM forms to utilize.
Human consciousness is changed when in proximity to an emerging EM
form because of the alteration in neurochemistry. In addition, people can
voluntarily tune themselves to specific EM frequencies through various rituals
and processes. Many occult practices as well as religious rites are designed to
foster an attunement to specific EM frequencies.
The theory also proposes that ancient ritual sites, including specific mound
and pyramid complexes, were built because they were in areas where frequent
and powerful geomagnetic fields emerged from the Earth. Many rituals were
designed to allow the participants to attune themselves to the frequency of the
emerging EM form. Many Native American legends relate how this process
works. Three books: The Archetype Experience, People of the Web, and Grand
Illusions; and a series of articles in Alternate Perceptions develop this theory.
References
Alternate Perceptions, Box 9972, Memphis, TN 38190
Jung, C. G. On the Nature of the Psyche (Princeton University Press, 1960, 1969).
Keel, John. UFOs:Operation Trojan Horse (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
Little, Gregory L. The Archetype Experience (Rainbow Books, 1984).
———. People of the Web (White Buffalo Books, 1990).
———. Grand Illusions (White Buffalo Books, 1994).
ghost rockets of 1946 Strange phenomena reported in the skies of Europe
just after the Second World War, for the most part in the year 1946, have
become known among the students of the UFO problem as the “ghost rocket”
mystery. This UFO flap was first recognized officially when Finland announced
over Helsinki radio on February 26, 1946, that “inordinate meteor activity” had
been noticed in the nation’s northern districts near the Arctic Circle. Later,
toward the end of May, persons in northern Sweden also became aware of
unusual sights in the heavens. On June 9th, when something spewing a trail of
smoke raced through the night sky over Finland’s capital city, Helsinki, at a
reported altitude of one thousand feet, leaving an illuminous afterglow, public
consternation became widespread. When another report was made, asserting
that an unidentified luminous body giving off glowing vapor had approached
the Finnish coast from the direction of the Baltic, only to turn sharply and
retrace its course, a corre spon-dent for the London Daily Mail, stationed in
Helsinki, cabled the story to England, thus arousing international interest.
Unsure of the exact nature of the phenomena being reported, the newspapers
adopted the term “ghost rocket” to explain the “missile-like meteors.” As
reports accumulated at an increasing rate, suspicions grew that the Soviet
Union was testing missiles over the Baltic Sea. Often, a single “ghost rocket”
would be seen exploding in the air, prompting careful ground searches for
fragments. According to press reports, the residue recovered after such
explosions consisted of tiny particles of dark-colored, slag-like material. This
seemed to reinforce the meteor theory, but it did not explain other puzzling
characteristics reported by witnesses.
People claimed that the strange objects did more than simply fall earthward,
as one would expect of a meteor. Instead, the ghost rockets would fly
horizontally, and sometimes even dive and climb, leap, barrel-roll, and
backtrack. And while some of the objects in question crossed the sky at
tremendous velocity, many times the objects reportedly moved in a very
leisurely fashion. Frequently the objects sighted were not shaped like missiles,
but more like common bolides, yet they would behave in an unme-teorlike
manner. Expressions used in such cases were: “luminous bodies,” “balls of
fire,” “cometlike,” “shooting starlike,” “flarelike,” “greenish globe,” “gray
sphere,” “like a huge soap bubble,” “shining ball,” “rotating object emitting
sparks,” and an “arrow-shaped object.”
One of the mysterious “ghost rockets” of the 1946 Scandinavian wave, as depicted by artist Hal
Crawford
However, the most mysterious cases were the ones that had started the
“ghost rocket” rumors. These sightings mentioned flying bodies that did not
have a round, fiery appearance. They resembled wartime German V-2 rockets.
Such descriptions used the words: “football shape,” “silver torpedo,” “cigar
shape,” “rocketlike,” “silvery projectile,” “cylinderlike,” “missile-like,”
“elliptical,” “bullet-shaped,” and “like a squash racket.”
Although documentation is incomplete, reports catalogued to date seem to
indicate that the aerial phenomena of 1946 slowly shifted southward from the
Arctic, eventually reaching Portugal, Tangiers, Italy, Greece, and even Kashmir
in India, by the month of September. The phenomena were striking enough to
warrant official reaction from the governments of Norway, Sweden, Finland,
Denmark, Greece, Belgium, England, Russia, and the United States.
Of all the nations affected, Sweden was the most alarmed, experiencing as
many as a thousand sightings. Reports of ghost rockets reached a peak on
August 11th in the skies of Sweden, and during the following days angry anti-
Soviet editorials were published in most newspapers as tension in the country
approached the boiling point. In the United States, such newspapers as the
Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times gave
front-page treatment to the latest dispatches from Stockholm. The Swedish
High Command, pressured by public opinion, seriously discussed the
possibility that the Russians were conducting a mysterious bombardment of
Sweden. The armed forces of Sweden were placed on alert and the government
authorities prepared a strong protest addressed at a “certain neighboring
country.” Restraining the Swedes, however, was the lack of any tangible
evidence aside from the fragments of slag-like material gathered from ground
searches. This perplexing problem was explained away by the Swedish military
experts by the postulation of what they called: “the new explosion theory,” the
idea that the ghost rockets were totally consumed by fire when they exploded
and burst into flame. This hypothesis was based on a number of vivid
eyewitness accounts.
According to the New York Times, the United States felt compelled to send
two top intelligence experts to Sweden to confer with the Swedish General
Staff. They were General James Doolittle and David Sarnoff. Just what the two
men learned about the mystery has never been revealed, although Mr. Sarnoff
told a group of electronics experts after his return from Europe that he was
convinced the strange missiles being reported over Sweden were not a myth but
something real.
Aside from the exact nature of the ghost rockets, the biggest question mark
about the flap was the secrecy imposed by the authorities in the nations
affected. Early investigations of the riddle relied on public cooperation, and
reports were often written up in detail in the press; but by July 27th, the Swedish
government prohibited newspapers from printing the location of any ghost
rocket. The Norwegian government also ordered that such information not be
published as of July 29th, followed by the government of Denmark on August
16th. Later, on August 31st, Norway totally banned ghost rocket sighting
information, while news on the continuing rocket barrage had all but
disappeared from the Swedish press by August 22nd. Lending support to the fact
that the mystery surrounding the ghost rockets was increasing was a story in the
Christian Science Monitor which declared that the British Foreign Office had
admitted that British radar experts were submitting secret reports about the
ghost rockets.
Although very little appeared in the Scandinavian newspapers at the time,
the Associated Press learned that ghost rocket sightings had continued in
considerable numbers right up to October before tapering off. The last official
word on the ghost rocket mystery in 1946 was a Swedish military communiqué
made public October 10th, remarking on the results of Sweden’s investigation.
The briefly worded release asserted that, while most reports were vague,
different instruments registered something definite, and that many reports were
“clear unambiguous observations.” The Swedish experts claimed that some 20
percent of the ghost rocket reports appeared to be neither aircraft nor natural
phenomena. Details of the 1946 Swedish investigation are still classified.
The ghost rockets returned to Scandinavian skies in the first part of 1946 and
during the early months of 1948. Even the conservative London Times
acknowledged that ghost rockets were once again infesting the skies of
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. According to the Times; pilots of the
Norwegian Air Lines reported missile-like objects speeding along through the
air, emitting bluish-green flames, and that these “missiles” were seen flying as
fast as 6,700 miles per hour, traveling as much as 25,000 feet high and as low
as the treetops. The 6,700 miles-per-hour clocking was witnessed and timed by
the president of the Norwegian Airline Pilots Association.
Ghost rocket-type UFOs are still being reported around the world, and they
remain one of the most spectacular and mystifying of unidentified aerial
phenomena. In summation, it should be stated that while the American wave of
1947 heralded the “flying saucer” craze, the European “ghost rocket” flap of
1946 truly marked the beginning of the modern era of large-scale UFO activity.
—LOREN E. GROSS
Gill sighting William B. Gill, an Anglican priest with a mission in Boainai,

Papua, New Guinea, observed craft-like UFOs—one with humanoid figures on
top—on two consecutive evenings, June 26-27, 1959. About twenty-five
natives, including teachers and medical technicians, also witnessed the
phenomena. They “signaled” the humanoids and received an apparent response.
This was one of sixty UFO sightings within a few weeks in the New Guinea
area.
An approximate chronology of the complex series of sightings follows
(based on Father Gill’s log of events and a summary report by his colleague,
the Reverend Norman Cruttwell):
June 26th
6:45 P.M. Large sparkling light seen by Father Gill in western sky. Called
natives who also saw it.
6:55-7:04 P.M. Up to four illuminated humanoid figures seen on top of
object, off and on.
7:10-7:20 P.M. Sky now overcast at about 2,000 feet. Humanoid figures seen
again, and a “thin electric blue spotlight” upward from the UFO, hovering
below the overcast. UFO disappears in clouds.
8:28-8:35 P.M. Skies clear again; UFO visible, appearing to descend and
increase in size. Second object seen over sea, “hovering at times,” and another
over village.
8:50-9:30 P.M. Clouds forming again. Large UFO stationary, others (about
three) like disks coming and going through clouds, casting a light halo on the
clouds. Large UFO moves away rapidly across sea toward Giwa.
9.46-10:30 P.M. UFO reappears overhead, hovering.
10:50 P.M. Heavy overcast; no sign of UFO.
11:04 P.M. Heavy rain.
June 27th
6-7 P.M. Large UFO seen again, first sighted by medical technician at
hospital, before dark. Closest sighting yet; seen clearly, bright and sparkling.
Humanoid figures seen on top. Father Gill and about twelve others in group
waved at humanoids, and one of figures appeared to wave back. One member
of the group waved both arms, and figures apparently responded by waving
both arms. Two smaller objects remained visible, stationary at a higher altitude.
7:45 P.M. Sky overcast; no UFOs visible.
On the first night, Father Gill stepped out the front door of the mission house
after dinner, about 6:45 P.M., and glanced at the western sky looking for Venus,
which was conspicuous at the time. “I saw Venus,” he said, “but I also saw this
sparkling object, which to me was peculiar because it sparkled and because it
was very, very bright, and it was above Venus and so that caused me to watch it
for a while; then I saw it descend towards us.”
Father Gill estimated the object’s angular diameter as about five inches at
arm’s length. Stephen Gill Moi, a teacher, who joined Father Gill a few minutes
later, said that if he put his hand out closed, it would cover about half of the
object.
In a signed statement, the witnesses agreed that the object was circular, had a
wide base and a narrower upper “deck,” had something like legs beneath it, at
times produced a shaft of blue light which shone upward into the sky at an
angle of about 45 degrees, and that four humanoid figures appeared on top.
Some of the witnesses described seeing about four portholes or windows on the
side. Father Gill saw what appeared to be bright panels on the side of the craft,
but did not interpret them as portholes.
“As we watched it,” Father Gill said, “men came out from this object and
appeared on top of it, on what seemed to be a deck on top of the huge disk.
There were four men in all, occasionally two, then one, then three, then four;
we noted the various times the men appeared....
“Another peculiar thing was this shaft of blue light, which emanated from
what appeared to be the center of the deck. The men appeared to be illuminated
not only by this light reflected on them, but also by a sort of glow which
completely surrounded them as well as the craft. The glow did not touch them,
but there appeared to be a little space between their outline and the light....”
Father Gill described the movements of the objects, especially the smaller
disks, as very erratic. They sometimes moved rapidly, sometimes slowly,
approaching and receding, changing direction, and at times swinging back and
forth like a pendulum. One object moved away and appeared to descend toward
Wadobuna village, and everyone thought it was going to land. The Papuans ran
down on the beach, but the object swooped up and away over the mountains,
turning red as it disappeared.
When the large object disappeared at 9.30 P.M., Father Gill said it made a
slight wavering motion, then suddenly shot away at tremendous speed across
the bay in the direction of Giwa, diminishing to a pinpoint and vanishing. No
sound was heard throughout.
The next evening, about 6 P.M., the same or a similar object reappeared while
the sky was still bright, first seen by Annie Laurie Borewa, a Papuan medical
assistant at the hospital. She called Father Gill, who in turn called Ananias and
several others to watch. “We watched figures appear on top,” Father Gill said.
“Four of them. There is no doubt that they were human. This is possibly the
same object that I took to be the ‘mother ship’ last night. Two smaller UFOs
were seen at the same time, stationary, one above the hills, and another
overhead.”
Two of the figures seemed to be doing something, occasionally bending over
and raising their arm as if “adjusting or setting up something. One figure
seemed to be standing, looking down on us (a group of about a dozen).” This
figure, he explained later, was standing with his hands on the “rail” looking
over, “just as one will look over the rails of a ship.”
Eyewitness sketch by Reverend William B. Gill
“I stretched my arm above my head and waved. To our surprise the figure
did the same. Ananias waved both arms over his head, then the two outside
figures did the same. Then both of us began waving our arms and all four
seemed to wave back. There seemed to be no doubt that our movements were
answered. All the Mission boys made audible gasps.”
As darkness began to settle in, Father Gill sent one of the natives for a
flashlight and directed a series of signals (“long dashes”) toward the UFO.
After a minute or two, the UFO wavered back and forth like a pendulum, in
apparent acknowledgment. They waved and flashed signals again, and the UFO
appeared to descend toward them, but stopped and came no closer. After two or
three more minutes, the figures disappeared. Then, at 6:25 P.M., two figures
resumed their activity, and the blue spotlight came on for a few seconds twice
in succession. By 7:45 P.M. the sky was totally overcast and no UFOs were
visible. This ended the sightings.
In his evaluation of the incidents, Dr. Donald H. Menzel, a Harvard
University astronomer who wrote three UFO-debunking books, refers to the
natives as “uneducated” and to Father Gill as being their “great leader,” to them
“a holy man” (implying that they were influenced in their testimony). He
attributed the sightings to the planet Venus viewed myopically by Father Gill.
Venus, he noted, was very conspicuous in the west, setting about three hours
after the sun.
Menzel then openly assumed that Father Gill was myopic and without
glasses at the time, that he “probably” had appreciable astigmatism as well
(causing him to see a distorted image of Venus), plus blood cells on the retina
producing illusory motion. He concluded: “Since a very simple hypothesis
accounts, without any strain, for the reported observations, I shall henceforth
consider the Father Gill case as solved. Moreover, I feel the same phenomena
are responsible for some of the more spectacular, unsolved cases in the Air
Force files.”
Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the former Air Force UFO consultant, notes in rebuttal
that Father Gill was wearing properly corrected glasses at the time and that
“Venus was pointed out separately by Gill.”
Although any prolonged series of UFO sightings with excited witnesses may
be “contaminated” by coincidental sightings of aircraft, meteors, or stars and
planets glimpsed through moving clouds, the report of a large structured object
(with moving humanoid figures) below a low overcast is not easily explainable.
—RICHARD HALL
References
Hynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Henry Regnery, 1972).
Hall, Richard. “Gill sighting” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New
Story, Ronald D. UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow/New English Library, 1981).
God Drives a Flying Saucer (Bantam, 1969). Connecticut schoolteacher

R.L. Dione writes that UFOs are God’s messengers, responsible for the
prophecies, scriptures, and miracles of the Christian religion. Even Jesus Christ
accomplished his miracles by channeling energy beamed to him by
extraterrestrial spacecraft, according to this view, and persons who were
incarcerated throughout history, perhaps including even Adolf Hitler, were
subjected to programing signals beamed at them by UFOs to produce “divinely
inspired writing.”
Gods of Eden, The (Avon Books, 1989). William Bramley proposes the
ultimate conspiracy theory of history—that we humans are a species of slaves
owned by extraterrestrial visitors who used our ancestors to mine the planet for
minerals. To keep humans divided, confused and in turmoil, these visitors or
keepers, called the “Custodians,” inspired the creation of competing religions.
A secret society called “The Brotherhood” has been used by the Custodians,
through its various branches such as the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians, to
foment terror, revolution, and warfare among humans.
Gods or Spacemen? (Amherst Press, 1964; reprinted in the U.K. by Sphere
Books, in 1977, as Messengers from the Stars). In this, the first of his five
books on the ancient astronaut theme, W. Raymond Drake scans the myths of
numerous ancient and modern cultures and civilizations to find similarities in
the way they portray visits from sky-dwelling beings who revealed cosmic
mysteries to leaders chosen from among the humans.
From witch doctors in Africa to the shamans of Siberia and the Celtic
Druids, Drake finds “fragments of a very high theology” that once existed
worldwide and inspired construction of the megaliths, the Nazca lines in Peru,
and the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids.
Good, Timothy (b. 1942). Timothy Good first became interested in UFOs in
1955, when his passion for aviation and space travel led him to read a book by
Major Donald Keyhoe which described sightings by military and civilian pilots.
Now regarded as a top authority, he has researched the subject worldwide,
interviewing key witnesses and amassing a wealth of evidence, including
several thousands of intelligence documents. He has conducted extensive
investigations in the United States for many years.
Born in London, Timothy Good completed his formal education at the
King’s School, Canterbury, then gained a violin scholarship to the Royal
Academy of Music in London, where he won prizes for solo, chamber and
orchestral playing. His professional career began in earnest in 1963 when he
toured the U.S. and Canada with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. From 1964
to 1978 he played with the London Symphony Orchestra. He has also played
with many other orchestras, and has worked for many great conductors and
composers, including Leonard Bemstein, Benjamin Brit ten, Otto Klemperer,
Leopold Stokowski, Igor Stravinsky and Sir William Walton.
Since 1978 Timothy Good has been involved in freelance session work for
television dramas, commercials, feature films, and recordings with pop
musicians. Those he has recorded for include Phil Collins, George Harrison,
Elton John, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Barbra Streisand, and U2. Recent
films include The Fifth Element, The Man in the Iron Mask, Tomorrow Never
Dies, and Wings of the Dove.
Timothy Good
Timothy Good is known to millions worldwide through his numerous

television appearances, and has acted as associate producer for several
documentaries on the UFO subject. He has given lectures worldwide at
universities, schools, and to many organizations, including the House of Lords
All-Party UFO Study Group, IBM, the Institute of Medical Laboratory
Sciences, the Royal Canadian Military Institute, the Royal Geographical
Society, the Royal Naval Air Reserve Branch, and the Oxford and Cambridge
Union Societies. He liaises with a number of retired intelligence officers, and in
1998 was invited to discuss the subject at the Defense Airborne
Reconnaissance Office in the Pentagon.
Timothy Good’s bestselling books include: Above Top Secret: The
Worldwide UFO Cover-Up (1987); retitled Beyond Top Secret: The Worldwide
UFO Security Threat (1996) in its revised edition; Alien Contact: Top-Secret
UFO Files Revealed (1993); Alien Update (1995), and Unearthly Disclosure
(2001).

247 High Street
Beckenham
Address:
Kent, BR3 1AB
U.K.
POSITION STATEMENT: It is my conviction that we are being visited by

several different groups of extraterrestrials, and that while some may not be well
disposed toward us, the majority are essentially benevolent. All share a common
“foreign” policy of avoiding open contact with earth, which to me seems entirely
logical. From my own investigations throughout the world, however, I am
convinced that selective contacts have been made with hundreds of individuals.
The visitors have no need to establish open contact, nor do they want the
majority of us to know what they are doing here.
—TIMOTHY GOOD
(Position statement was adapted from Timothy Good’s first book, Above Top
Secret: The Wordwide UFO Cover-up, 1987.)
Grays The image of the alien in UFO culture has generally been dominated by a
fetus-like entity with a large, bald head (more pear-shaped than round). Usually
the being is small compared to humans. Often the limbs are described as
thinner or more slender, but the more closely universal rule is that such aliens
are never fat or obese. Current convention labels approximations to this
stereotypical UFOnaut with the term “Grays.” Ostensibly this is because of
grayish skin tones usually being associated with this body type. In practice,
absence of this defining trait does not inhibit use of the label so long as a big
bald head appears somewhere in the description.
The project of assembling a history of this alien stereotype with a view to
understanding its origins and rise to dominance is a daunting one, because there
are special hazards. There are no maps to guide us. Therefore, this
encyclopedia entry should be regarded as a pioneering effort, not as the final
word.
We will start this history by offering the proposition that the idea underlying
the Grays was constructed in the 19th century.
Collection of typical “Grays” drawn by forensic artist William Louis McDonald
Images that fit loosely the definition of Grays can be found here and there in
art and myths long predating the modern era. Finding them is an easy and
pleasant diversion. Take the Greco-Egyptian painting of mortuary house 21 at
Tuna-Gebel. It has an entity with a large smooth head and very slender build
that includes a pencil-neck. Few would quarrel that the look matches that of the
Grays. The fact that the being is the shadow of the deceased represented
symbolically as a black emaciated corpse makes it questionable that the look
carries the modern idea. (Baines and Melek, 1990)
Dr. Gregory Little has found a description of the watchman at the gates of
Sheol in the Hebrew Book of Enoch as gray in color, short like a child, and
taking on a somewhat human appearance that he says left him stunned. (Little,
1994) I’ve described elsewhere items from ancient Denmark and the Congo
whose facial features mimic the exotic facets of Whitley Strieber’s “visitor.”
(Kottmeyer, 1995)
Such images are quite scattered and could be random outcomes of the
immense creativity of artists exploring hundreds of permutations. There is no
evidence of deeper linkages between them and current UFO beliefs, and no hint
of historical connections. As a parallel example, ponder how some short bald
fairies ended up in Star Trek, Next Generation Starfleet uniforms, even though
the painting was done 1880 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s father. (Philpotts,
1978) One may not be able to rule out some swirly space-time anomaly causing
such things, but coincidence has to be the favored judgement.
The trait of big-headedness can be found associated with aliens inhabiting
the sun in Pierre Boitard’s Mussee des familles (1838), but the beings possess
hair and otherwise seem completely human. This seems a simple way of
representing higher intelligence in such beings. I consider it slightly outside the
definition of a Gray. (Pinvidic, 1993)
The idea underlying the Grays did not and could not exist before the idea of
evolution. Christian theology held that God created life in the first week of
creation. Each species was designed optimally for its niche in the hierarchy of
nature, and, presumably, given all the fuss over the Ark, would never be
recreated. Transformation of form or future improvement on present design
held no place in such a worldview. Evolution was heretical and rarely
considered at length prior to the 19th century. It is to one of the proponents of an
early version of evolution, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that we will turn to for an
important element of out history.
Lamarck was an early opponent of the ideas of special creation and
catastrophism. Nature did everything little by little and successively. Where
earlier thinkers spoke of a great chain of being with each species created
specifically for its place, Lamarck felt that varying environmental pressures
created new needs and increased the use of certain organs to make them more
perfect while adding to the organism’s complexity. Conversely, “...the
permanent disuse of an organ, arising from a change of habits, causes a gradual
shrinkage and ultimately the disappearance and even extinction of that organ.”
(Lamarck, 1809;1963)
Lamarck regarded man as a probable product of evolution. The process, he
felt, reached the limits of complexity and perfection; and, while noting
individual instances of the perfecting or degradation of reason, will, and
morality, was not compelled to speculate on the future of the human form.
Since man’s intelligence and powers protect him from the voracity of any
animal, man could potentially multiply indefinitely, but he believed the
Sublime author installed a safety feature: “...nature has given him numerous
passions which unfortunately develop with his intelligence, and thus set up a
great obstacle to the extreme multiplication of individuals of his species. It
seems that man is responsible for keeping down the numbers of his kind; for I
have hesitation in saying the earth will never be covered by the population that
it might support; several of its habitable regions will always be sparsely
populated in turns, although the periods of these fluctuations are, so far as we
are concerned, immeasurable.” (Lamarck, 1809; 1963) Man “...assuredly
presents the type of highest perfection that nature will attain to....” (Lamarck,
1809; 1963)
Towards 1866, a Lamarckian named Alpheus Hyatt indicated his studies of
fossils were providing a less optimistic understanding of the process of
evolution. Just as individuals slip into senility and decrepitude at the end of life,
groups like races and species display a senile phase before going extinct. This
theory of racial senescence later becomes an indispensable feature of the
doctrine of orthogenesis. It held that the organism was not shaped by natural
selection, but by processes internal to the germ plasm that caused modification
along trendlines that ran on until they became overdeveloped and detrimental to
survival. Examples of this process could be found in the huge antlers of the
Irish elk, the demise of the sabre-toothed tiger, and the massiveness of
dinosaurs. Hyatt himself believed man was already showing senile and
regressive features. (Bowler, 1983)
The writings of Herbert Spencer, another Lamarckian, provide us with the
next step in the development of the idea underlying the Grays. In his work The
Principles of Biology (1875), he speculates at length on the human future. He
feels there will be “larger-brained descendents” and the brain will have more
convolutions, a more developed structure. Asserting the existence of “an
apparent connection between higher cerebral development and prolonged
sexual maturity,” evidence that excessive expenditure of mental activity during
education causes complete or partial infertility, and conversely that “where
exceptional fertility exists there is a sluggishness of mind;” Spencer concluded
further evolution may be expected to cause a decline in his power of
reproduction. (Spencer, 1875)
There most likely would be greater delicacy of manipulation, better
coordination of complex movements, and a “corresponding development of
perceptive and executive faculties.” There would also be greater power of self-
regulation and higher emotional development. He would be more moral.
Crimes and cruelties would cease. Of strength and agility, Spencer doubted
there would be further improvement. He does not explicitly articulate that a
general degeneration of the rest of the body would follow, but that is now only
a couple of steps away. (Spencer, 1875)
We should digress to point out that Darwin does not belong to this line of
development. His theory of evolution by natural selection builds in part on
Lamarck’s arguments against special creation and catastrophism while stripping
animal evolution of its central mechanism of use-inheritance. The issue of
Darwin’s views on progress is a notoriously thorny subject, and on the future
form of man he was silent. He seemed to think some ongoing natural selection
existed in the destruction of more primitive peoples. However, he was also
concerned that natural selection no longer operated to scythe down the sickly
and degenerate. Any slow evolution of mankind, however, paled next to his
pet-horror, the eventual and inevitable ice-death of the earth under the aegis of
a cooling sun. “To think of the progress of millions of years with every
continent swarming with good and enlightened men all ending in this...Sic
transit gloria mundi with a vengeance.” (Darwin quoted by Desmond and
Moore, 1991)
Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection,
believed the human physique was no longer subject to natural forces. War
killed off the strongest and bravest, he thought. Skin color and hair perhaps still
evolved, but the body remained an upright ape. The human species was still
capable of spectacular advances with women’s rights giving females free
choice in marriage and allowing them to reject males who were chronically
diseased, intellectually weak, idle, or utterly selfish. (Brackman, 1980) These
matters, however, belonged to the moral and spiritual realms, not the realm of
man’s physical being.
Thomas Henry Huxley, the era’s most prominent Darwinian, also lies
outside this line of development, but bears special attention and caution.
Scholars have caricatured him alternately as a naïve advocate of progress and a
purveyor of cosmic pessimism. These extreme interpretations derive from
selective focus on separate facets of a carefully balanced view blending the
lessons of natural history and social history.
Early writings indicate he “had no confidence in the doctrine of ultimate
happiness,” but it was impossible for him to be blind to the improvements in
life that science was making manifest around him in his personal sphere.
(Desmond, 1994) Huxley often argued with Spencer over the nature of
evolutionary and social progress. Huxley soon developed the metaphor of
society advancing, insect-like, from grub to butterfly. There are periods of
repressive restraint, dark ages, that are broken in dramatic moults like the
French revolution. Each moult moves us closer to a butterfly state of man,
albeit that may prove to be terribly distant. (Desmond, 1994)
In 1894 he offered his mature statement on these matters in Evolution and
Ethics and we see the same balancing. He rejects utopia, “the prospect of
attaining untroubled happiness, or a state which can, even remotely, deserve the
title of perfection, appears to me as misleading an illusion as ever dangled
before the eyes of poor humanity.” Yet, “that which lies before the human race
is a constant struggle to maintain and improve.” (Huxley quoted in Paradis and
Williams, 1989)
The theory of evolution encourages no millennial expectations, he writes:
“There is no hope that mere human beings will ever possess enough
intelligence to select the fittest.” (Paradis and Williams, 1989) He sees “no limit
to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of
investigation and organized in common effort, may modify the conditions for a
period than that now covered by history. And much may be done to change the
nature of man himself...(we) ought to be able to do something towards curbing
the instincts of savagery in civilized men [thus permitting] a larger hope of
abatement of the essential evil of the world...” (Paradis and Williams, 1989)
Evolution, however, permits both progressive and retrogressive
development. “The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the
suggestion that the power and the intelligence of man can ever arrest the
procession of the great year.” Eventually, “the evolution of our globe shall have
entered so far upon its downward course that the cosmic process resumes its
sway; and, once more, the State of Nature prevails over the surface of our
planet.” This is an allusion to the thermodynamic heat death of the Earth.
(Paradis and Williams, 1989)
To point to these latter quotes and label it cosmic pessimism has the perverse
air of saying that someone who expects to achieve some measure of happiness
and success and die at 120 is being depressing. Huxley dialectically balanced
optimism and pessimism in a manner he felt most people did. (Paradis and
Williams, 1989; Hillegas, 1974) Huxley nowhere comments on the future
biological shape of man as Spencer did, nor does he dwell on the implications
of the possibility of his retrogressive modification.
The final steps in the development of the idea underlying the Grays were
made by one of Huxley’s students. The student thought Huxley was the greatest
man he ever knew and when he published his first book he sent his teacher a
note that read:
May 1895
I am sending you a little book that I fancy may be of interest to you. The
central idea—of degeneration following security—was the outcome of a
certain amount of biological study. I daresay your position subjects you to a
good many such displays of the range of authors but I have this excuse—I
was one of your students at the Royal College of Science and finally (?):
The book is a very little one. (Quoted in Smith, 1986)
It was a work of fiction that describes a traveler’s encounter with a delicate

little people of the far future. The first person is described as “a slight creature
—perhaps 4 feet high—clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather
belt. Sandals or huskins were on his feet; his legs were bare to the knees and his
head was bare...He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature,
but indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful
kind of consumptive—that hectic beauty of which you used to hear so much
about.” As he observes more of them he notes their Dresden china prettiness
had peculiarities. They had some curly hair that did not go past the neck and
cheek. There was no trace of beard or other facial hair. The lips were thin. The
ears were singularly minute. Chins were small and ran to a point. The eyes
were large, but mild and indifferent.
There is nothing said about the size of the head, and the intelligence of these
people is slight. Their behavior is child-like and playful and they show a lack of
interest in the traveler. There was little to distinguish the sexes. The traveler
eventually learns the name of this beautiful race—Eloi. He also learns of a
second race—the Morlocks—which are described as a white, ape-like human
spider. They tend the underworld of machines that make the utopia of the
aristocratic Eloi possible.
The title of the story was The Time Machine. The student was H.G. Wells.
His boast to Huxley that it was based on an amount of biological study is easily
proven. Four years earlier he had written a non-fiction essay titled Zoological
Retrogression that displayed his familiarity with the biological literature
involving degeneration. In it he describes a popular and poetic formulation of
evolution as a steadily rising mountain slope that he terms Excelsior biology.
Proclaiming it lacking any satisfactory confirmation in geological biology or
embryology, he argues degeneration has entire parity with progressive trends.
He points to ascidians, cirripeds, copepods, corals, sea-mats, oysters, mussels,
and mites as examples. Advance has been fitful and uncertain. There is no
guarantee in scientific knowledge of man’s permanence or permanent
ascendancy. Huxley’s teachings are apparent except for one point of
divergence. Wells concludes The Coming Beast must certainly be reckoned in
any anticipatory calculations in the Coming Man. (Philmus and Hughes, 1975)
Though Wells believed he was swimming against the stream of mass
opinion in this essay, some historians would argue he was being swept along by
the currents of his time. The concept of degeneration was not new and the
Victorian era’s concerns over the permanent underclass bred in urban areas like
London had spawned a theory of urban degeneration that held powerful appeal
to the British after 1885 no matter what their politics. (Nye, 1985) This
degeneration scare, as it has been termed, was part of a yet larger trend of
cultural pessimism spreading among western intellectuals. (Herman, 1997)
Peter Bowler, an expert on evolutionary theories of the era speculates that E.
Ray Lankester’s book Degeneration is a likely source of the ideas behind “The
Time Machine.” (Bowler, 1989) The unavoidable caveat to this attribution is
that the concept of degeneration was present in so many forums from medical
journals like The Lancet to much popular fiction. Wells could have been
influenced by a variety of sources.
The 11th chapter of The Time Machine takes the reader beyond the time of
the Eloi and Morlocks to a farther future where the Earth approaches its end.
Life had grown sparse and was in obvious regression. The dominant form was
an ungainly monster crab smeared in slime. He goes another thirty million
years into the future and only lichen and liverworts remained. That and a black,
round, hopping thing with tentacles trailing from it. It seems like Alpheus Hyatt
writ large; life as a whole falls into senescence as everything becomes extinct.
(Eisenstein, 1976)
The Eloi come halfway to our image of the Gray in short and fragile bodies
being indicative of a degenerate evolutionary history. What is missing is the big
bald head. Wells began playing with that part of the image maybe as early as
1885 for an address before a student debating society. It was written out for
publication in a facetious book review for the Pall Mall Budget, 9 November
1893. “Of a Book Unwritten, The Man of the Year Million” is a short piece
with no ambitions of wanting to be taken seriously. Wells imagines a book
titled The Necessary Characters of Man of the Remote Future deduced from the
Existing Stream of Tendency. Though easily missed, Wells is telegraphing his
intent to play upon the ideas of orthogenesis which as its name implies dealt
with straight-line trends in the fossil record. Just as a fish is molded to
swimming and a bird is molded to flight, man’s form will be determined by the
trait of intelligence. We already see the decay of much of the animal part of
man: the loss of hair, the loss of teeth, the diminution of jaw, slighter mouth and
ears. Athleticism yields to a subtle mind in real-world competition. The coming
man, then, will clearly have a larger brain and a slighter body than the present.
Wells:
Behold the dim strange vision of the latter day face suggested by loss of
unused features: Eyes large, lustrous, beautiful soulful; above them, no
longer separated by rugged brow ridges, is the top of the head, a glistening
hairless dome, terete and beautiful; no craggy nose rises to disturb by its
unmeaning shadows the symmetry of that calm face, no vestigial ears
project; the mouth is a small perfectly round aper ture, toothless and
gumless, unanimal, no futile emotions disturbing its roundness as it lies,
like the harvest moon or the evening star, in the wide firmament of the face.
(Quoted by Hughes, 1993)
Potentially, man’s knowledge of organic chemistry will supplant the use of a

stomach and alimentary canal and the brain will swim in a nutritive bath—
some clear, mobile and amber liquid. In still deeper time the cooling Earth will
force a retreat to galleries and laboratories deep inside the bowels of the planet
following the diminishing supply of heat with boring machinery and glaring
artificial lighting. Wells takes pleasure in noting the whole of this imaginary
book may vanish in the smoke of a pipe with no great bother—one of the great
advantages of unwritten literature.
But of course it did not vanish and did become a great bother. It ended up in
a book that would guarantee a very enduring life. The book was War of the
Worlds (1898). Mars in an ancient world and evolution has proceeded farther
than on Earth, thus is the logical setting for Man of the Year Million. The
Martians were 4-foot diameter round heads. They had very large dark-colored
eyes, no nostrils, and no ears per se. They had a fleshy beak for a mouth. The
internal anatomy was, in a word, simple. They had no entrails and did not eat.
Rather, they injected blood from other creatures, most notably a type of biped
with flimsy skeletons and feeble musculature, and a round head with large eyes
set in flinty sockets.
The Martians were absolutely without sex and allied tumultuous emotions.
They budded off the parent. Wells’s fictional narrator explicitly credits the
author of the Pall Mall Budget book review with forecasting such a creature,
albeit in a foolish, facetious tone. Noting that many a truth is said in jest, the
idea seemed likely that Martians had once been like us but with a brain evolved
at the expense of the rest of the body. They turn out to also be telepathic. The
Martians die off at the end of the war because of their vulnerability to earth’s
microorganisms. There were none on Mars, probably because their science
eliminated them ages before. We would say nowadays that their immune
systems had degenerated from disuse. (Hughes, 1993)
The mental giantism and diminished sexuality clearly echo Spencer. It has a
Lamarckian sensibility in the early part of the argument of man’s form being
molded by the trait of intelligence, but Wells does include Darwinian
competition in suggesting a subtle mind wins over athleticism in the real world.
One can fairly wonder how many people would accept that premise these days.
The basic thrust that evolution would trend to a grossly overspecialized super-
tick, however, is decisively orthogenetic. Admittedly, extinction in a foreign
environment rich in microorganism is not strictly a proof of maladaptation, but
nobody is meant to think this type of monstrosity is a good thing.
The critical literature on War of the Worlds generally agrees that the
Martians are nightmare extensions of ourselves and our machine civilization. It
is a warning that an over-reliance on cold intellect and technology need not lead
to better and better. Basically it is a moral it shares with The Time Machine.
Where the atrophy from over-reliance on technology and the brain is played for
comic effect in the Pall Mall Budget, here it is played for horror. That a story
with such an anti-intellectual moral should come from the pen of a person as
intellectual as Wells is slightly ironic, but not amazing. Science fiction writers
are a brainy bunch, but are perennially worried over the social consequences of
science and technology.
Wells himself never regarded his atrophied aliens as a realistic speculation.
Though he granted life on Mars might exist and even speculated on what
interesting differences might be expected because of the harsh environment, his
nonfiction writings did not advance the probability that big, bald-headed aliens
with degenerate bodies existed. (“The Things That Live on Mars” reprinted in
Hughes, 1993) The idea that begat the Grays was born as a jest that never was
intended by its author to be taken as a serious scientific speculation.
References
Baines, John, and Malek, Jaromir. The Cultural Atlas of the World: Ancient Egypt (Andromeda, 1990).
Bowler, Peter. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
Bowler, Peter. The Invention of Progress (Basil Blackwell, 1989).
Brackman, Arnold C. A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell
Wallace (Times Books, 1980).
Desmond, Adrian, and Moore, James. Darwin—The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (Warner Books,
1991).
Desmond, Adrian. Huxley—The Devil’s Disciple (Michael Joseph, 1994).
Eisenstein, Alex. “The Time Machine and the End of Man,” Science Fiction Studies (July, 1976).
Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1981, reprinted in Philmus, Robert M. and Hughes, David Y. H.G.
Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (California University Press, 1975).
Herman, Arthur. The Idea of Decline in Human History (Free Press, 1997).
Hughes, David Y. A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds (Indiana University Press, 1993).
Hillegas, Mark R. The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (Southern Illinois
University Press, 1974).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Ishtar Descendant,” The Skeptic (1995).
———. “Varicose Brains: Entering a Gray Area” Magonia (February 1998).
Lamarck, Jean-Baptist. Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition With Regard to the Natural History of
Animals (Hafner Publishing, 1963). Originally published in 1809.
Little, Gregory. Grand Illusions (White Buffalo Books, 1994).
Nye, Robert A. “Sociology: The Irony of Progress” in Chamberlin, J. Edward, and Gilman, Sander L.
Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (Columbia University Press, 1985).
Paradis, James and Williams, George C. T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics with New essays on its
Victorian and Sociobiological Context (Princeton University Press, 1989).
Philpotts, Beatrice. The Book of Fairies (Ballantine, 1978).
Pinvidic, Thierry. OVNI vers une Anthopologie d’un Mythe Contemporain (Editions Heimdal, 1993).
Smith, David C. H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (Yale University Press, 1986).
Spencer, Herbert The Principles of Biology (D. Appleton, 1875).
POSTSCRIPT: In UFO lore, the Grays are sometimes good and sometimes evil,
but generally they are amoral. In other words, they represent multiple aspects of
the human personality—especially the contemporary human (or humanoid)—for
good or ill.
They are usually described as sexually neuter and perform their hybrid
breeding experiments, for the most part, through artificial insemination. The
gray color symbolizes neutrality in morals, sexuality, and emotions. It also
symbolizes “gray matter” or intelligence. The eyes are large and black (without
pupils) like a shark’s eyes—uncaring, one might say. The hairlessness of the
Grays is derived from the assumption that we are losing our animal
characteristics—but to be replaced by emotionless clones.
The Grays aren’t exactly the good guys or the bad guys—they’re in a “gray
area,” as Martin Kottmeyer has pointed out. They represent human evolution
and its uncertain future. They are analogies of ourselves.
—RONALD D. STORY
Great Falls (Montana) movie On August 5 or 15, 1950 (the exact date is not
known with certainty), Nick Mariana, thirty-eight at the time and the general
manager of the local “Selectics” baseball team, in the company of his secretary,
nineteen-year-old Virginia Raunig, were at the Great Falls Legion Ball Park in
preparation for that afternoon’s game. It was about 11:30 A.M., and, as was his
habit before every game, Mariana checked the wind direction by watching the
steady stream of white smoke issuing from a towering Anaconda smokestack
located about a mile northwest of the stadium. Mariana said: “As I looked up I
saw two silvery objects moving swiftly out of the northwestern blue. They
appeared to be moving directly south. My first thought was, ‘Get the camera—
they’re flying discs!’ Then I thought again, ‘Don’t be stupid—they must be
planes in a bank and I’ll see their wings in just a minute.’ Then as they got
closer and more distinct, I realized there were no wings—these were not
banking planes, they were flying saucers!” (Saunders, 1968) objects appeared
to hover or stop in midair.” (Saunders, 1968)
One of the frames (cropped) from Nick Mariana’s 16mm movie shot over Great Falls, Montana,
in August of 1950
The witness then called to his secretary, who came running, as Mariana
himself raced from the grandstand to his car where he always kept a 16mm
movie camera in the glove compartment. After losing a few more seconds to
turn the telephoto turret lens into position, he managed to film the objects for
sixteen seconds while standing by his car. The duration of the whole sighting
was about one minute. Miss Raunig arrived in time to see “two silvery balls,”
but Mariana’s description was more detailed. He said the objects were
definitely disk-shaped, apparently “about fifty feet across and about three or
four feet thick.” Also, “the discs appeared to be spinning, like a top.”
(Saunders, 1968)
The distance was estimated at about two miles, altitude at 5,000 to 10,000
feet, and the objects’ speed at between 200 and 400 miles per hour. Mariana
also claimed that at one point, just before he started filming, “the objects
appeared to hover or stop in midair.” (Saunders, 1968)
Computer enhancement of the Great Falls, Montana, UFOs
The Montana movie was submitted to the U.S. Air Force for analysis in
1950, but the military investigators did not seem impressed. Project Grudge
regarded the UFOs simply as “the reflections from two F-94 jet fighters that
were in the area.” (Ruppelt, 1956) Sunlight from the fuselages washed out the
other details and that was why Mariana had been fooled. Mariana, however,
claimed that both he and Raunig saw the jets in another part of the sky just after
seeing the UFOs.
Then in 1952, according to former Project Blue Book chief Captain Edward
J. Ruppelt, the investigation was reopened “at the request of the Pentagon.”
(Ruppelt, 1956) This time, the airplane-reflection theory was studied a little
more closely. Though Mariana and his secretary had testified to seeing two jets
roaring by in the opposite direction just two minutes after the UFO sighting, the
Air Force investigators understandably wanted something more solid. With
information obtained through an intelligence officer at Great Falls Air Force
Base (now Malstrom AFB), the landing pattern of the planes that were in the
vicinity on August 15th was carefully established. Ruppelt said: “The two jets
just weren’t anywhere close to where the two UFO’s had been. Next we studied
each individual light and both appeared to be too steady to be reflections.”
“We drew a blank on the Montana Movie—it was an unknown.” (Ruppelt,
1956)
When the film was returned, Mariana claimed that some thirty frames at the
beginning had been removed. It was in those frames that the oval shape of the
UFOs could be seen. The Air Force denied editing the film except to remove a
single frame because of damaged sprockets. Mariana claimed he had a letter
about the removal of the thirty frames, but was unable to produce it.
In 1953 the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel examined the Mariana film.
Their scientists believed that aircraft could account for the images on the film,
so they concluded that the film probably showed sunlight reflected from
aircraft.
The film was analyzed again in 1955 by Dr. Robert M. L. Baker, Jr., a
specialist in celestial mechanics, then employed by the Douglas Aircraft
Company. Dr. Baker shot comparative films of planes at varying distances
reflecting the sun, using a 16mm movie camera similar to Mariana’s. But none
of the images came close to resembling those on Mariana’s film, convincing
Baker that if Mariana had filmed two jets “at the largest distances compatible
with their speeds and the angular rate of the images...[their structure] would
have been identifiable on the film.” (Baker, 1972).
Baker did not believe the images were the result of any known natural
phenomena. He determined that the objects were two miles from the camera,
and his experiments showed that jet fighters would have been identifiable as
aircraft. Baker considered the case unexplained.
It wasn’t until the Condon Committee investigation in 1966 that the film was
again examined. All the previous investigations were reviewed and Mariana
was re-interviewed. The principal photo analyst for the Condon study, Dr.
William K. Hartmann (an astronomer), found that the objects had a constant
elliptical shape consistent with the “resolution of disks oriented parallel with
the ground.” (Baker, 1972) Hartmann concluded, however, that the evidence of
the film was not sufficient to draw a final conclusion about the objects.
In the end, none of the studies produced any evidence that the film had been
faked. Data indicated that the objects were basically disk-shaped and that the
images on the film were consistent with highly polished metal surfaces.
Because these pictures consist of 290 continuous frames of 16mm color
movie film, the possibility of a hoax in this case is generally considered by
skeptics and proponents alike to be extremely remote. And, if Mariana’s
accompanying testimony is given any credibility at all, this case would have to
rank as one of the “best” of all time. Dr. David R. Saunders, a psychologist and
member of the former University of Colorado UFO Project, considered it “the
one sighting of all time that did more than any other single case to convince me
that there is something to the UFO problem.” (Saunders, 1968)
Along with the photos taken at McMinnville, Oregon, also in 1950, this is
the one other photographic case which defied all efforts by the Condon team to
arrive at a completely satisfactory explanation. Dr. William K. Hartmann, chief
photo-analyst for the University of Colorado UFO Project, wrote in the Condon
Report that: “The case remains unexplained. Analysis indicates that the images
on the film are difficult to reconcile with aircraft or other known phenomena,
although aircraft cannot be entirely ruled out.” (Gillmor, 1969)
Most UFOlogists believe the photographic evidence, as well as the
eyewitness testimony suggests that the aircraft explanation is unlikely.
Computer enhancements by William Spaulding at GSW (Ground Saucer
Watch) add further support to the conclusion that the Great Falls/Mariana
movie is one of the strongest photographic cases of apparently genuine UFOs
on record.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE & RONALD D. STORY
References
Baker, Robert M.L., Jr. “Motion Pictures of UFO’s” in Sagan, Carl and Page, Thornton, eds. UFO’s—A
Scientific Debate (Cornell University Press, 1972; W.W. Norton, 1974).
Gillmor, Daniel S. and Condon, Edward U., eds. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (E. P.
Dutton/Bantam Books, 1969).
Randle, Kevin D. “Great Falls (Montana) movie” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs
(Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
———. Conspiracy of Silence (Avon Books, 1997).
———. Scientific UFOlogy (Avon Books, 1999).
Saunders, David R. and Harkins, R. Roger. UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong
(Signet/NAL, 1968).
Guardians of the Universe? (St. Martin’s Press/New English Library, 1980).

Ronald Story makes a case that alleged evidence for ancient astronauts is a
psychological projective test based on faith and hope, not verifiable facts.
Despite the contention of Erich von Däniken and other proponents, the
construction of the Great Pyramid in Egypt and other megalithic monuments
never required a level of technology which was beyond “the capacities of
Earthmen working on their own in the normal context of their own cultures.”
Much of the evidence used in support of ancient visitation by aliens, especially
artistic representations on cave and temple walls, takes the form of
psychological projective tests in which the book authors plant interpretive ideas
in the minds of readers, substituting propaganda for logic.
Gulf Breeze (Florida) incidents Since the late 1980s, Gulf Breeze, Florida,
has become a “window” area of UFO sightings and other paranormal events.
(See WINDOW AREAS) It all began on November 11, 1987, with a foiled
abduction attempt. Local building contractor Edward Walters happened to
glance out the window of his home office when he saw an unusual glow behind
some trees. Grabbing his Polaroid camera, he headed outside just in time to
snap five pictures of a spectacular UFO heading towards his house. Then, as
the UFO hovered silently above him at an altitude of about 200 feet, Ed was
struck by a paralyzing blue beam which shot down from the bottom of the
object. Screaming as the beam lifted him up, he resisted with all his power
while a “voice” communicated with him telepathically from the UFO saying
“calm down” and “stop it.” Ed answered by screaming “screw you!”. Then, just
as a plane flew by, the UFO let him go and disappeared out of sight.
After discussing the matter with his wife and son, Ed submitted the photos
anonymously to the local weekly newspaper, The (Gulf Breeze) Sentinel. Soon
after Ed’s story and the photos were published in the Sentinel on November 19,
1987, the whole area became a UFO hot spot. First dozens, then hundreds, of
other witnesses came forth to report their own UFO sightings and experiences.
These included sightings of UFOs, jets chasing UFOs, and abductions.
By the time the first Gulf Breeze flap had subsided in July, 1988, there had
been over 100 sightings involving over 200 people (with many multiple witness
sightings). Twenty-four of these sightings were reported by Ed Walters who,
understandably, became a highly controversial figure—especially because of
the multiple photo opportunities afforded him—making Walters as contentious
as George Adamski and Billy Meier before him.
The first photo taken by Ed Walters on November 11, 1987
Although some investigators consider the whole series of sightings to be

explainable as a hoax by Walters, followed by misidentifications and attempts
by other witnesses to gain public recognition, the fact is that numerous
witnesses with no connection to Walters have provided detailed descriptions of
objects that appear to have been what he photographed.
One of the most explicit descriptions was given by a medical doctor and his
wife who saw the object at rather close range (a few hundred feet) for many
seconds hovering over the Pensacola Bay near their home. They could see light
from the object reflected off the water.
From July, 1988 through late November, 1990, the sighting rate diminished
somewhat, there being about 120 sightings over that time period. About a
dozen or so of these involved Ed Walters. In late November a new series of
sightings began which had a distinctly different nature. The new sightings were
of a light moving through the sky, which had peculiar properties. Usually it was
first seen by witnesses as a red light (although sometimes it was initially seen
as white and would then turn red), moving at a steady pace through the early
evening sky within an hour of darkness. The light would remain red for a
period of time—from many seconds to several minutes—and then it would
suddenly turn white and start flashing brightly. Quite often glowing lights were
seen to drop downward from the light as it began flashing. Then it would go
out.
Lights such as this were seen so often that a group of local residents began a
nightly “skywatch,” broken only by bad weather, which existed from
November, 1990 through 1995—even though the first major wave of sightings
ended in July, 1992, by which time there had been about 170 recorded events.
Here “recorded” means multiply witnessed and generally recorded on video
and sometimes with telephoto photography as well. Starting in September,
1991, yet another type of moving object was seen. Witnesses observed (and
recorded) rings of light, that is, individual lights forming a circular pattern
moving through the sky. This author was a witness to one such ring of eight
white lights forming an octagon, which appeared in the sky above Gulf Breeze
at about 8:30 P.M. on the night of September 16, 1991. A crude triangulation
combined with photographic data showed it to be many feet, perhaps several
tens of feet, in diameter. It simply appeared in the sky and then moved upward
and perhaps toward the 30 or so witnesses to this event and then, after 70
seconds, disappeared.
Enlargement of the “UFO”
The red light and its “relatives” (two red lights traveling in parallel, a ring of
lights, a cluster of lights) seen over the year and a half period, were early on
referred to as “bubba” (slang for “brother”). These “bubba” sightings were
observed by several TV camera crews as well as the local residents and visitors
who came from all over the world to see the Gulf Breeze UFOs.
The bubba sightings have never been satisfactorily explained. The initial
thought was that some sort of balloon carrying a road flare could explain some
of the reported phenomena. However, it could not have been this simple.
“Bubba” was never observed to rise into the sky and travel along. Instead, it
always appeared at some altitude, hence requiring remote ignition or a long-
burning, hidden fuse. A simple red road flare could not explain the sudden
change of color to extremely bright white and the subsequent many-second-
long duration of rapid white flashing, often at a high rate comparable to the
frame rate of a TV camera (30 complete frames per second). If a bubba were a
pyrotechnic display, it would have to have been some special formulation.
Moreover, an experiment was performed to compare the optical spectrum of
bubba with the spectrum of a red flare. A diffraction grating was placed inside a
camera that was then used to photograph both a bubba light and a red road
flare. Analysis of the resulting images showed conclusively that the color
spectra of the two were different, with bubba having more blue light than a road
flare—a color shift that was obvious to the witnesses who saw both the bubba
light and the flare that was burned almost immediately afterward.
Several of the bubba lights were simultaneously witnessed by observers
separated by considerable distances (up to several miles) thereby allowing for
accurate triangulations. For several of the triangulated sightings it was possible
to calculate a speed of up to 50 miles per hour, much faster than any wind at the
time, and even a crosswind. If this was a hoax, it would require a motorized
transport system, such as a model plane or a very small blimp. Yet, there was
never any engine noise associated with a bubba sighting. The triangulated
altitudes were a few thousand feet.
Except for one crude attempt at a hoax, which was identified immediately by
the witnesses, there was not one shred of hard evidence, such as debris found
on the ground or floating on the water around Gulf Breeze, that the bulk of the
bubba sightings were hoaxes, even though one would expect that with nearly
two hundred recorded events there would have been some mistake at some time
by the hoaxer(s). Had they been hoaxes involving some pyrotechnic display,
they would have been illegal and highly dangerous (a lighted flare falling on a
building could cause a fire; in some cases the bubba was over a thousand feet
high and in the vicinity of the landing pattern for Pensacola airport). Of course,
the balloon-flare hypothesis could not explain the rings of lights and other
sightings of even more complex light arrangements.
Photo by Ed Walters, taken on May 1, 1988, showing two different UFOs
No debris of a suspicious nature was ever found, even though many of the
sighted objects were over the land when they disappeared. Several of the bubba
sightings have been analyzed in detail and are presented in UFOs are
Real...Here’s the Proof (Walters and Maccabee, 1997) along with the details of
this author’s sighting. Also in that reference is an analysis of the January, 1990,
sighting in which Ed Walters and other witnesses took pictures of a structured
object with a red light on the bottom.
After July, 1992, the sightings in the Gulf Breeze area diminished
considerably.
Photos taken by Ed Walters on January 12, 1994. The wide-angle view shows the jet and UFO in
the same picture. Enlargements are superimposed to show more detail. The second insert
shows the F-15 partially obscuring the UFO.
Although there have been quite a few sightings in the years since, there has been
nothing like the 1987-1988 and 1990-1992 concentrations. Ed Walters had nine
sightings during the time period from 1993 through the end of 1996 and took
pictures or videos of what he saw. The incident depicted in the above photos is
described below.
January 12, 1994
Ed Walters was in his office which has windows that face northward toward
the Santa Rosa Sound (his house is on the north side of Pensacola Beach).
Across the Sound is the south shore of Gulf Breeze.
As he was working at his desk a glint from something shiny in the clear sky
attracted his attention. He looked up and saw a strange object, stationary in the
sky apparently above Gulf Breeze. Its shape indicated it was no ordinary object.
He grabbed a 35 mm camera with zoom lens (with a maximum effective focal
length of 214 mm) that he kept loaded in the event that something should
appear, and ran outside where he had an unobstructed view. The camera was set
on automatic so, based on subsequent experiments, its shutter speed was
probably 1/250 or 1/500 sec.
As he started to zoom and focus on the UFO, he heard the noise of jets.
Lowering the camera he noticed two jets—one low and one high—coming
from the east, heading west toward the object (he was looking north-
northwest). They were not traveling at a high rate of speed (estimates based on
the photos suggest about 300 mph). He un-zoomed the lens to get a wide angle
shot and, when the lower jet appeared in the frame, he took the first picture. He
wanted a close-up of the UFO, so he zoomed in on it and tried to hold the
camera steady. This took a few seconds and, just as he was about to click the
shutter button, he noticed that the lower jet was entering the field of view. He
took the second shot and watched as the lower jet made a slight curve around
the UFO and then headed west. The upper jet was still headed west. These two
jets traveled westward for several seconds and then made a U turn and headed
back toward the UFO. Suddenly it streaked away to the east and the jets then
made a southward turn and flew over Pensacola Beach and off into the
distance. The total sighting may have lasted about a minute.
Ed described the UFO as appearing like a large egg with its axis vertical,
with several smaller ball-like or egg-shaped objects forming a horizontal ring
about the vertical center of the UFO. The photos support this description. The
first photo shows the UFO and the jet approaching. The second photo is
particularly remarkable, however, because the shutter opened just as the jet was
passing between the camera and the UFO. From the known size of the jet, the
known focal length of the camera lens at full zoom and image size on the film,
one can calculate that the jet was about 8,500 ft from the camera and about
1,300 ft high. The image size of the UFO then indicates that it was about 30 ft
wide and 20 ft high if it was only a few hundred feet farther from the camera
than the jet (larger if it was farther away).
The experiences of Walters, his wife and family, and many of the other
witnesses have been documented in three books: The Gulf Breeze Sightings by
Ed and Frances Walters (Morrow, 1990; Avon 1992), UFO Abductions in Gulf
Breeze by Ed and Frances Walters (Avon, 1994), and UFOs are Real, Here’s the
Proof by Ed Walters and Bruce Maccabee (Avon, 1997).
—BRUCE MACCABEE
POSTSCRIPT: This whole “three-ring flying saucer circus,” claims science

writer Robert Sheaffer, has been exposed as a hoax perpetrated by Walters for
financial gain. A Gulf Breeze youth came forward to confess that he and two
others, including Walters’ son, had helped to fabricate the photos. Equally
damning, occupants of a house Walters had lived in during the alleged UFO blitz
found a UFO model—hidden under some insulation in the garage attic—which
resembled the object seen in the Walters photos. The model was wrapped in part
of an old house plan drawn by Walters himself. News photographers were able
to use the model to essentially duplicate some of the UFO photos that had made
Walters rich and famous.
When two MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) investigators (Rex and Carol
Salisberry) took another look at Walters, they found that he was “adept at trick
photography,” and the case had all the earmarks of a clever hoax; one that
enriched Walters with a book deal and fees from movie and television
producers, which reportedly added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Interestingly, this updated finding caused MUFON to lose confidence in the
Salisberrys—who had previously received an award from MUFON for their
outstanding investigations—but not in Walters.
H
Haines, Richard F. (b. 1937). Dr. Haines retired from NASA as a senior
research scientist in 1988. Originally from Seattle, Washington, he received his
M.A. and Ph.D. degrees (in experimental psychology and physiology) from
Michigan State University in 1962 and 1964 respectively.
Richard Haines
He then worked for the NASA Ames Research Center, where he developed
and then directed NASA’s “High Luminance Vision Laboratory” carrying out
rendezvous and docking simulation studies for America’s Gemini and Apollo
Programs.
From 1967 to 1985 Haines was a research scientist in various NASA life
science divisions carrying out theoretical and applied research on astronaut and
aircraft pilot vision. He was appointed Chief of the Space Human Factors
Office at Ames (1986-1988) and retired from government service in 1988.
Dr. Haines was also an associate professor of psychology at San Jose State
University, and a senior research scientist for the Research Institute for
Advanced Computer Science (1988-1992). In 1993 he joined the staff of
RECOM Technologies, Inc. to carry out advanced research and development in
multimedia telecommunications for NASA’s International Space Station, and,
more recently, for an advanced air traffic control research simulator to be built
at Ames.
Dr. Haines is the author or editor of six books on UFO themes, including:
UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (1969), Observing UFOs
(1980), and Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind (1998).

325 Langton Ave.
Address:
Los Altos, CA 94022 U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: Although I do not yet have enough reliable

information concerning the relevant characteristics of the UFO phenomenon
with which to form a scientific judgment of its “core” identity, I do believe that
the phenomenon is objectively real; i.e., I believe that the many thousands of
eyewitnesses around the world are experiencing UFO phenomena in a manner
very similar to the way any other human with normal sensory capabilities would
perceive it if they happened to be present. And the wide variety of reported
characteristics of UFOs suggests that there is also a cognitive (psychological?)
component present which brings into play deeply submerged sub- or
preconscious protosymbols lying largely dormant within most people. I also
think that we will one day discover the phenomenon’s “core” identity. When that
day comes, we are likely to be in for some big surprises concerning the nature of
reality and infancy of our sciences.
—RICHARD F. HAINES
Hall, Richard H. (b. 1930). Richard Hall is a graduate (in philosophy) of

Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana (1958), and is currently employed
by a major publishing firm in the Washington, D.C. area. Among numerous
other credits in the UFO field, he was assistant director of the National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) from 1958 to 1967,
and former editor of the MUFON UFO Journal.
Richard Hall
He is currently Director of Publications (and a Board Member) of MUFON;

a National Board Member for the Fund for UFO Research; and Consulting
Editor for the International UFO Reporter (IUR) (published by the J. Allen
Hynek Center for UFO Studies, Chicago, Illinois). Hall was the compiler-editor
of The UFO Evidence, published by NICAP in 1964, and the author of
Uninvited Guests: A Documented History of UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters,
and Coverups, published by Aurora Press in 1988). He is presently compiling
and editing The UFO Evidence: Volume II: 1964-1993, to be published by
Scarecrow Press in 2001.

4418 39th St.
Address: Brentwood, MD 20722
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: Among the hundreds of so-called “UFO reports”

each year, a sizable fraction of those clearly observed by reputable witnesses
remain unexplained—and difficult to explain in conventional terms. There is a
modicum of physical evidence, radar cases, residual effects, and some films and
photographs in support of the unexplained cases. Collectively, these cases
constitute a genuine scientific mystery, badly in need of well-supported,
systematic investigation.
In answer to the skeptical objection that the alleged unexplained cases have
not been thoroughly investigated, that is exactly my point. They should be. The
circumstantial and sometimes physical—evidence indicates that something real
is going on for which no satisfactory explanation currently exists.
The available “theories” include: (1) Extraterrestrial, (a) visitors from
another planet, (b) “time travelers,” (c) gods or other not entirely physical
beings from realms unknown; (2) Terrestrial, (a) mistaken observations of Earth
technology or familiar events misidentified, (b) advanced secret technology, (c)
psychic projections of the human mind, (d) hoaxes/imagination.
I reject (2-a) and (2-d) as inapplicable to the hardcore unexplained cases.
Among the other choices, by Occam’s razor, I prefer (1-a—the so-called “nuts
and bolts” visitors from elsewhere.
—RICHARD H. HALL
Harmonic 33 (A.W. Reed, 1968). New Zealand airline pilot Bruce Cathie,
seeking an explanation for six of his own UFO sightings, writes about his
discovery of a worldwide grid system set up by aliens in ancient times to power
their spaceships using gravitational frequencies. He suspects that scientist
Nikola Tesla uncovered the power grid’s secrets, which were seized at his death
by U.S. government officials who have since exploited this information.
harvest This is a central term used in The RA Material and other spiritually
based ET channeled sources to denote the impending physical, energetic, and
consciousness transformation on Earth. This global shift is predicted to occur
during the time period of 2010-2013 A.D., after which the planet will enter a
higher dimension of cosmic life. Geological upheaval, climatic and solar
anomalies, increasing UFO visitation, socio-cultural stresses, and the entire
range of global ET contacts are all believed to be due to the imminence of this
major cycle change in human evolution.
This change is also alluded to by other mystic, indigenous, and New Age
sources, including esoteric Christianity (“the Rapture, Ascension, Revelation,
Kingdom of Heaven”), Judaism and Islam (“Return of the Messiah/Imam
Mahdi”), Hinduism (“end of the Kali Yuga”), Theosophy (“the Aquarian
Age”), as well as the Mayans and Hopis (“the Fifth World”), Edgar Cayce, and
Nostradamus. It is held that only those individuals who embrace love,
compassion, and kindness to a sufficient degree will be able to remain in
incarnation on the physical planet, after Earth enters its new cycle of evolution.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Hesemann, Michael (b. 1964). One of Europe’s leading UFO researchers,
Michael Hesemann studied cultural anthropology and history at Göttingen
University. Since 1984 he has published Magazine 2000, Europe’s most
popular magazine on the paranormal. His international bestsellers The Cosmic
Connection, Beyond Roswell (with Philip Mantle), UFOs: A Secret History, and
The Fatima-Secret were published in eighteen countries with a circulation of
nearly a million copies.
Hesemann has produced several award-winning video documentaries
(distributed in fifteen countries) and worked as a UFO expert and advisor for
several TV programs in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Mexico, and Japan. He is an
sssociate member of the Society for Scientific Exploration and the Israel
Exploration Society.
He received honorary membership in the Italian Centro Ufologico Nazionale
(C.U.N.) and was honored with the Colman VonKeviczky Medal of Hungarian
UFOology. In 1989, Hesemann organized the world’s largest UFO conference,
“Dialogue with the Universe,” with 1830 participants and 44 speakers in
Frankfurt, Germany. It was the first time that Russian scientists, military, and
UFO researchers presented their evidence to a Western audience. Because of
his contacts in Russia, Hesemann was able to publish the KGB UFO files.
Hesemann has investigated UFO incidents in forty-four countries and has
travelled more than 700.000 miles in search of answers. He has interviewed
U.S. sstronauts as well as Russian cosmonauts on their UFO experiences. He
has lectured at international conferences in twenty-three countries, at dozens of
universities, the United Nations, and was personally received by Pope John
Paul II.
Hesemann’s historical work on religious relics was greeted by the Pontiff
with “admiration and appreciation...for your laborious research.” Hesemann
resides in Duesseldorf, Germany.

An der Obererft 88
Address: D-41464 Neuss
Germany
michaelhesemann@
E-mail:
www.hesemann.m-n-d.com
Web site: www.hesemann.m-n-d.com
POSITION STATEMENT: (1) After investigating the UFO phenomenon all over
the world, after studying thousands of pages of released governmental
documents, and interviewing eyewitnesses and insiders, including generals,
intelligence officers, cosmonauts, and astronauts, military and commercial pilots,
I do not have the shadow of a doubt anymore that we are indeed visited by
extraterrestrial intelligences. The evidence just does not allow another
conclusion.
(2) We have to learn to deal with this situation and prepare for a contact.
Studying the behavioral pattern of the phenomenon, I came to the conclusion
that they are neither friend nor foe, but study our planet and civilization from a
mainly scientific perspective. They are as curious to learn more about us, as we
would love to study other human and humanoid civilizations.
Michael Hesemann
Most probably the ETs have been here since the beginning of mankind.
They, during our history, intervened in our evolution several times. Today, after
the human race have become “adults,” they prefer to be nonintrusive, obviously
because every interference would contaminate their research subject. Therefore,
any approach must come from our side, by a common, international effort, e.g.
through the United Nations.
(3) A contact with an extraterrestrial civilization is the greatest challenge for
mankind in the Third Millennium. We would finally realize that we are indeed
not alone, what could cause a new Copernican revolution, a quantum leap in
our thinking and perspective. We would finally realize that we are one mankind
and all the small differences which separate humans from each other today—
nationality, race, religion—would disappear. Only together mankind can
explore the universe, our true home and destiny.
—MICHAEL HESEMANN
Higdon experience Carl Higdon was elk hunting south of Rawlins, Wyoming,
when he said he met a man from another planet. Higdon claims that the “man,”
named “Ausso,” pointed a “fingerlike” appendage at him and, instantly, they
were aboard a spaceship. The experience, which lasted from 4 P.M. to 6:30 P.M.,
supposedly involved a trip to Ausso’s home planet, 163,000 “light miles” away,
and Higdon’s safe return to Earth.
It was a Friday night, October 25, 1974, at about 4 P.M. Carl Higdon (an oil
driller, employed by the AM Well Services of Riverton, Wyoming) was hunting
elk on the north edge of the Medicine Bow National Forest, when his bizarre
experience began to unfold.
“I walked over this hill and saw five elk,” Higdon said. “I raised my rifle
and fired, but the bullet only went about fifty feet and dropped.” He went over,
got the bullet, and tucked it into a fold in his canteen pouch. “I heard a noise
like a twig snapping and looked over to my right, and there in the shadow of
the trees was this sort of man standing there.”
Higdon described the “man” as being six feet two inches tall and weighing
approximately 180 pounds. He was dressed in a black suit and black shoes and
wore a belt with a star in the middle and a yellow emblem below it. Higdon
also said the man was quite bowlegged, had a slanted head, and no chin. His
hair was thin and stood straight up on his head.
“He asked me if I was hungry and I said yes,” Higdon said, “so he tossed me
some pills and I took one.” Higdon commented that he didn’t understand why
he took the pills because ordinarily he doesn’t even like to take an aspirin. The
man had told him that the pills were “four-day” pills, apparently to slake his
hunger. Higdon said the man called himself “Ausso” and asked Higdon if he’d
like to go with him. Higdon replied “yes” and the man pointed an appendage
which came out of his sleeve.
Higdon said he suddenly found himself in a transparent cubicle along with
Ausso. He was sitting in a chair with “bands” around his arms (apparently
holding him in the chair which resembled a high-backed “bucket seat”) and a
helmet-like apparatus on his head somewhat like a football helmet, except that
it had two wires on top and two on the sides leading to the back. On a sort of
console opposite his chair, Higdon said he saw three levers of different sizes
which had letters on them and which Ausso manipulated.
Artist’s conception of “Ausso” from Higdon’s description
Higdon was unclear on the size of the cubicle. He said there was a mirror on
the upper right, in which he could see the reflection of the live elk which
seemed to be behind him in a “cage” or corral. They were still, not moving, just
as they had been when he first spotted them before he encountered Ausso. He
thought the cubicle was about seven feet square but couldn’t account for the elk
being there also.
When Ausso pointed his appendage at the largest lever it moved down and
the cubicle felt as if it was moving. After they took off, Higdon said he saw a
basketball-shaped object under the cubicle, which he took to be the Earth.
There was another being in the cubicle who “just disappeared” when they
landed. Ausso said they had traveled 163,000 “light miles.”
Outside the cubicle, Higdon said, was a huge tower, perhaps ninety feet high
with a brilliant, rotating light, and he heard a sound like that made by an
electric razor. The light bothered his eyes considerably, and he put his hands
over them.
Standing outside the tower were five human-appearing people: a gray-haired
man of forty or fifty years old, a brown-haired girl about ten or eleven, a blond
girl of thirteen or fourteen, a young man of seventeen or eighteen with brown
hair, and a blond seventeen- or eighteen-year- old girl. They were dressed in
ordinary clothing and appeared to be talking among themselves.
Ausso pointed his “hand” and they (Ausso and Higdon) moved into the
tower and up an elevator to a room where he stood on a small platform and a
“shield” moved out from the wall. Ausso was on the other side of it. The shield
was “glassy” appearing, stayed in front of Higdon for what he estimated to be
three or four minutes, then moved back in the wall.
Ausso then told Higdon he was not what they needed and they would take
him back. The two moved out of the room to the elevator and then down to the
main door. It seemed that all Ausso needed to do was to point his hand and they
moved effortlessly.
Next, Higdon found himself back in the cubicle with Ausso, who was
holding Higdon’s gun. He said the gun was primitive and he wanted to keep it,
but wasn’t allowed to, and so he gave it back to Higdon. Then he pointed at the
longest lever and Higdon found himself standing on a slope. His foot struck a
loose rock and he fell, hurting his neck, head, and shoulder.
At this point Higdon didn’t know who or where he was. He got up and
walked past his pickup truck, which was sitting in a wooded area on a road with
deep ruts. He walked along the track about a mile past the truck, then came
back to the truck and heard a woman’s voice. As he regained a little of his
senses, he used the citizen’s band radio to call for help. He told the woman he
didn’t know who or where he was. Authorities were notified, and Higdon was
eventually found about 11:30 that night. He was dazed and confused and had
difficulty recognizing his wife. The search party had a considerable problem
retrieving Higdon’s two-wheel drive vehicle (it had to be towed as it could not
navigate the rough road).
Higdon was brought to the Carbon County Memorial Hospital in Rawlins at
2:30 A.M. on the twenty-sixth. Besides the sore head, neck, and shoulder, his
eyes were extremely bloodshot and they teared constantly. He had no appetite
on Saturday, and his wife Margery had to force him to eat. On Sunday morning,
however, he was ravenous and complained about the meager size of the
hospital breakfast.
This, essentially, is Carl Higdon’s account of his time from 4:15 P.M. on
October 25, 1974, when he first spotted the five elk, until he called on the CB
radio, at around 6:30 P.M., that evening.
Some foundation for his story is found in the testimony of the search-party
members, who said Higdon’s pickup truck could not have driven into or out of
the area where it was found. Also, unidentified lights were seen near the area
where Higdon was found before the searchers started driving out of the area, so
the lights of the vehicles could not have accounted for the unidentified lights.
According to psychologist Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle, who investigated the case,
Higdon has agreed to other interviews, plus the use of hypnotic techniques for
the purpose of obtaining further information about his experience. Sprinkle
comments that: “Although the sighting of a single UFO witness often is
difficult to evaluate, the indirect evidence supports the tentative conclusion that
Carl Higdon is reporting sincerely the events which he experienced. Hopefully,
further statements from other persons can be obtained to support the basic
statement.”
Higher Self This term is a translated from the Sanskrit word Atman, used by
Hindus and in Western mysticism, to denote the essential, monadic core of the
human body/mind/spirit. Metaphysical science holds that each of us is connected
to an individualized, yet universal Higher Self, which possesses a full and
complete knowledge of all our past events and future development. Many
meditation practices and New Age teachers are concerned with the means by
which we may contact Higher Self for guidance and to support personal healing
and spiritual evolution. —SCOTT MANDELKER
Hill abduction Barney and Betty Hill’s “interrupted journey” was the first
publicized time-lapse (or “missing time”) UFO-abduction episode, and the first
such case in which hypnosis was used to elicit hidden details of the experience.
THE ENCOUNTER
The Portsmouth, New Hampshire, couple was returning home from a

vacation at Niagara Falls on the night of September 1920, 1961. Barney, 39
(who died in 1969), worked as a postal clerk in Boston; while Betty, 41, was
employed by the state as a child welfare worker.
Betty and Barney Hill
As they drove south on U.S. 3 in northern New Hampshire, the Hills noticed
a bright moving star-like object in the southwestern sky. The time was
approximately 11 P.M.
The object turned toward the car and then seemed to accompany it, at a
distance, for the next 35 miles. The couple stopped now and then to observe the
UFO through binoculars. As it drew closer, the light source appeared to be a
spinning circular object describing an erratic, step-like path above the White
Mountains.
In the vicinity of North Woodstock, the “object” came to a halt over an open
area. When Barney stopped the car and got out, the UFO crossed the road
ahead, from right to left, and hovered above a field next to the highway. Barney
then proceeded into the field, halting periodically to view the unknown object
through his binoculars. He could see a large, flat, disk-shaped craft with two
rows of bluish-white glowing windows and a red light on each side.
According to Mr. Hill, eight or more humanoid figures were looking back at
him. The “leader” of the group, in particular, both fascinated and terrified him.
As the disk descended toward Barney, all of the occupants except the leader
started scurrying around, at which time the two red lights moved outward at
opposite ends of the “craft.” After the craft approached to within 100 feet or
less, Barney panicked. He dashed to the car and took off down the highway.
The couple recalled hearing “beeping” sounds that vibrated the car twice—
once after they left the UFO, and again in the Ashland area some 30 miles
farther south. Oddly, the Hills had no memory of the interval between the two
sets of “beeps” nor why they arrived home at least two hours later than
expected. Other peculiarities were noted as well.
BETTY’S DREAMS
About ten days after this experience, Betty said she had a series of dreams in
which she and Barney were captured by the entities and examined onboard
their craft. To Mrs. Hill, the dreams indicated her recall of a real abduction that
must have occurred following their initial encounter along Highway 3.
Betty reported the sighting to nearby Pease Air Force Base and to the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. As a New England
advisor to NICAP, I was asked to interview the New Hampshire couple. Just
one month after the encounter, I questioned the two witnesses for six hours and
came away impressed with them and their incredible story. (Had I known at the
time the historic significance of this prototypical UFO abduction, I would have
handled many aspects of my investigation quite differently.)
Drawing of the UFO by Walter Webb, based on Barney Hill’s original sketch
THE ABDUCTION
Over the next two years, Barney Hill experienced anxieties and physical
ailments—possibly connected with his UFO encounter—and Betty became
even more concerned about her capture dreams. Eventually the couple was
referred to Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon for treatment. In 1964 Dr.
Simon hypnotized the Hills separately, and found that both husband and wife
related similar stories of being kidnapped and examined by the UFO beings. (I
have heard all eleven hours of the taped testimony.)
Barney recalled that after hearing the first “beeps,” he was directed
telepathically to drive to a wooded area where his car stalled. A group of alien
figures approached the vehicle and then led the couple into the landed UFO.
The beings were described as about five feet tall with large gray heads,
enormous slanted eyes, small nose, and narrow mouth.
THE EXAMINATIONS
Betty said she was left with the leader and an examiner who proceeded to inspect
her arm under a big lens and to take samples from her skin, ear, hair, and nails.
Instruments used in the examination included a skin-scraper, hand-held light, a
cluster of needles (that touched the skin all over her body), and a long needle
inserted into her navel.
Explaining that the needle was a “pregnancy test,” the examiner seemed
surprised at the pain this caused. Betty said the pain disappeared when the
leader passed his hands over her eyes. When Mrs. Hill asked the leader where
he was from, he exhibited a three-dimensional (holographic) “star map.”
According to Betty, it was explained to her that the curved lines connecting
twelve of the glowing dots were routes from the leader’s home star system to
other stars. Under Simon’s posthypnotic suggestion, Mrs. Hill later drew the
star map as she remembered it.
Artist’s depiction of the alien humanoids, as described by Betty and Barney Hill (Drawings by
Diane Prentice)
Barney Hill, who was led to another room, recalled lying on a table with his
eyes closed. He said his exam included the withdrawal of sperm and rectal
samples, as well as the removal of skin cells.
After their exams, the Hills were led to their car where they watched the
alien ship depart. Memories of the abduction began to fade as they drove back
to the main highway. Near Ashland the couple said they heard the second set of
“beeps,” and conscious memory returned.
REALITY OR FANTASY
It was Dr. Simon’s belief that the initial encounter probably involved an
unidentified military aircraft, while the abduction scenario happened only in
Betty’s dreams—a fantasy she shared with her husband. Simon, however, had
no interest at all in the UFO subject, refusing even to read my own case
material submitted to him. While I do agree that contaminated testimony
between Barney and Betty probably played some role in the retelling, I remain
convinced to this day of the reality of both stages of the UFO encounter.
BETTY’S STAR MAP AND THE FISH MODEL

In 1972 Marjorie Fish, an Ohio schoolteacher, finished a six-year search to
find matching stars for the ones in Betty Hill’s star map. After constructing
more than 20 three-dimensional models of the Sun’s neighborhood out to 65
light years, and spending hundreds of hours photographing and inspecting
models from all angles, Fish found what she believed were of the 12 linked
stars in Betty’s drawing, including the home base of the Hill aliens (Zeta
Reticuli) and our sun.
Oblique view of the Fish model, drawn from a photo by Marjorie Fish
Front view of the Fish model. Compare with Betty’s drawing shown below.
At the outset, Marjorie Fish herself had expected to discover many random
patterns among the stars that would resemble the Hill map. Much to her surprise,
only one unique set of stars emerged that combined: (1) a reasonable match with
Betty’s star map; (2) all lines in the map connecting solely to stars that were
good candidates for life-bearing planets; (3) all of the life-supporting candidate
stars found in the volume of space encompassing the Hill network stars were
included in Betty Hill’s map; and (4) all stars in the Hill pattern were connected
to each other in a logical travel sequence from star-to-star—the base star being
linked only with the nearest stars having spectral classes that favor life.
I spent six hours with Marjorie in 1974, discussing her work and reviewing
her data. From my own personal inspection of the model, I can attest that the
star pattern she selected in her model did indeed match amazingly well the one
in Betty Hill’s map.
Alien star map, as drawn by Betty Hill under post-hypnotic suggestion
Returning home with copies of her voluminous notes and photographs, I checked
her data in six star catalogs and found no errors. The significance of Fish’s
prodigious research has so far gone unrecognized by the scientific community.
Though but an amateur astronomer, Marjorie’s work certainly deserves to be
acknowledged by professionals, because someday the Fish model could be a
vital key in unlocking the UFO rnystery.
Despite the recent discovery that several of the Fish/Hill stars are double
(damaging Fish’s single-star criterion), Fish’s selected stellar candidates still
hold up rather well. Double stars do not necessarily prohibit planetary life.
Marjorie’s model should now be reexamined in light of the Hipparcos satellite
and its more accurate distance measurements to thousands of stars—including
those in the Fish/Hill network.
—WALTER N. WEBB
Hollow Earth, The (University Press, 1969). Raymond Bernard thinks a

worldwide conspiracy exists to suppress knowledge that the Earth is hollow
and the place where UFOs, driven by survivors of Atlantis, originate. Bernard
heads a European branch of the Rosicrucians and claims he was told by
extraterrestrial visitors to write this book to prepare humans for their coming.
Home of the Gods, The (Editions Robert Laffont, 1972). Andrew Tomas
opines that the residents of Atlantis were descendants of extraterrestrials and
their civilization was destroyed by the Biblical flood. Some Atlanteans escaped
the flood in spacecraft, others fled to a network of underground tunnels,
chambers and hidden valleys, from where they occasionally still emerge in
UFOs to share “their wisdom with those who are ready for it.”
Hopkins, Budd (b. 1931). Budd Hopkins is probably the world’s best known
UFO-abduction researcher and an important pioneer in the field. Originally
from Wheeling, West Virginia, he attended Oberlin College, where he studied
Art and Art History, graduating in 1953. That year he moved to New York City,
where he has lived ever since, with summers spent at his home on Cape Cod.
As a painter and sculptor, Hopkins has had over fifty one-person shows in
the United States and Europe. His work is in the permanent collections of many
prestigious museums and art galleries in New York, Washington, San
Francisco, and elsewhere. These include the Solomon R. Guggenheim, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the
Metropolitan Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the British Museum, and many other
distinguished institutions.
Hopkins has received a fellowship grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and other distinguished awards, and his
work has been widely and favorably reviewed. As a writer on the subject of
modern art, Hopkins has contributed articles on art to magazines such as Art
Forum, Arts, and Art in America.
Budd Hopkins
Hopkins had his first UFO experience in 1964. On a sunny afternoon on
Cape Cod, he and two others had a daylight UFO sighting, which sparked his
interest in this subject.
In 1975, a neighborhood friend described a UFO landing and sample-
gathering occupants he had witnessed in a New Jersey Park, across the Hudson
River from Manhattan. This was Hopkins’ first extensive investigation, and in
1976 he published an account of this case in a New York newspaper, The
Village Voice. The case was widely publicized, and among the many ensuing
reports Hopkins received were several that included tantalizing accounts of
“missing time.”
With the help of veteran UFO researcher Ted Bloecher and several mental
health professionals, Hopkins began to investigate these accounts in which
previously hidden UFO abduction experiences came to light. This research led
to his first book, Missing Time published in 1981. In it, Hopkins presented
several patterns heretofore unreported in the abduction literature. Among them
were:
1. The potentially widespread nature of the (covert) abduction phenomenon, in

which the abductees may have virtually no conscious recollection of
sighting a UFO, observing occupants, and so on.
2. Physical sequelae, such as wounds, bruises and other lesions often resulting
from these abductions.
3. Repeated abductions, whereby an individual may be abducted again and
again, as if he/she were the object of an ongoing systematic study.
4. Screen memories, apparently imposed by the aliens, in which a more
palatable image (such as an owl or a deer) was substituted for images of the
aliens themselves.
5. Evidence that abductions were carried out in families, seemingly across the
same genetic stock.
Hopkins second book, Intruders was published in 1987, and presented the
then radical notion that the central goal of the UFO occupants was to create a
hybrid mix of alien and human DNA. The accounts in Intruders detailed
processes of artificial insemination, ova and sperm sampling, and the
systematic removal of hybrid fetuses. Intruders was widely read, translated into
many languages, and was the subject of a CBS miniseries. It remains one of the
most influential books on the subject of UFO abductions ever written.
In 1996, Hopkins published his third book, Witnessed, about an abduction
that took place in New York City in 1989, and was witnessed by a number of
people including government officials and an important international leader.
The incident was apparently a deliberate demonstration by the aliens of their
power, and it remains the clearest account of their involvement in human
political affairs.
Hopkins has also detailed several other previously unnoticed abduction
patterns, such as:
1. Alien co-option, the “taking over” of a human to function in an abduction

as if he/she was an ally of the aliens, not the other abducted humans.
2. The “Mickey-Baby Ann” phenomenon, in which aliens occasionally abduct

children who do not know one another, putting them together from time to
time to “bond,” as if the aliens are studying the formation of human
romantic relationships. Many such cases have since been reported.
Hopkins lectures widely around the world on his research findings, and—as
founder and director of The Intruders Foundation—continues to lead the way in
the field of UFO-abduction research.
P.O. Box 30233

Address: New York, N.Y. 10011
U.S.A.
E-mail: ebhopkins@aol.com
Web site: www.spacelab.net
Hudson Valley (New York) UFO sightings Spectacular sightings of a

triangular or boomerang-shaped UFO that has seemingly haunted the Hudson
River Valley (along the border of New York and Connecticut) from 1983 to the
present day.
The Hudson Valley of New York is located about thirty miles north of New
York City and is one of the most densely populated areas in the country. This
area of New York is rich in legend, and tales of unusual happenings date back
to colonial times. The home of the infamous headless horseman from
Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is located in the heart of
Hudson Valley. Now, many residents of southern New York report encounters
of a different kind—sightings of a giant UFO that they say is not of this Earth.
Artist’s conception of the Hudson Valley UFO
During the evening of March 23, 1983, thousands of people from all walks
of life reported that they had seen an object larger than a football field pass over
the highways and their homes. Bewildered witnesses said they saw an object
that was solid in structure and made up of very dark gray materials. The UFO
was described as having rows of multi-colored lights attached to a triangular
shape, as it moved slowly across the night sky. The sightings continued on a
regular basis, and in 1984, at 10:20 P.M., the object was videotaped in Brewster,
New York. At this time also the UFO was witnessed by thousands, as it silently
drifted over five counties of New York and Connecticut.
Shortly after the object was videotaped, the giant UFO was reported
hovering over the Indian Point Nuclear Reactor located on the shore of the
Hudson River near Peekskill, New York, at 10:30 P.M. The object was witnessed
by State Police and twelve New York State Power Authority Police officers.
They reported that the UFO hovered three-hundred feet over reactor Number
Three for fifteen minutes. They said it was triangular in shape with a network
of grids underneath and was the size of three football fields. The object then
slowly moved across the Hudson River to Rockland County, where hundreds of
residents and police officers saw it. Later, a spokesman from the Indian Point
Reactor Complex confirmed the sightings, but insisted that the object in no way
affected plant operations. This was the first time a UFO was officially
confirmed as being over or near a nuclear reactor.
One of the official explanations for the sightings made by the FAA and the
Air Force was that the UFO was nothing more than a group of prankster pilots
flying in close formation. The video tape of the UFO was analyzed twice by
imaging scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Their conclusions were that the lights on the video tape were not individual
objects, but rather one large object. The scientists were unable to identify the
UFO, however, as a conventional aircraft; and so it remains a genuine
“unknown” to this day.
Although much of the UFO activity has died down during the late nineties,
many people in the area claim to have close encounters with an alien
intelligence that they feel is the intelligence from the UFO. Where the UFO
comes from remains a mystery, and without a doubt generations from now it
will become part of the area’s local folklore.
As one witness (an IBM executive) said in an interview: “This thing was a
city in the sky, it was not from this world and airplanes it was not!”
—PHILIP J. IMBROGNO
NOTE: For more information, see the author’s books: Contact of the Fifth Kind
(Llewellyn, 1997) and Night Siege: The Hudson Valley UFO Sightings
(Llewellyn, 1998, second edition, expanded and revised).
Humanoids, The (Henry Regnery, 1969). Edited by Charles Bowen. Eleven

essayists survey more than 300 reports of spacecraft landing and disgorging
alien occupants. These occupants are of every imaginable shape, size, and color
—from giants over eight feet tall to tiny dwarfs—leading Bowen, the former
editor of Britain’s Flying Saucer Review magazine, to conclude that “UFOs and
their occupants are in the eyes of the beholder.”
Hynek, J. Allen (1910-1986). Dubbed “The Galileo of UFOlogy” by

Newsweek magazine (November 1977), Dr. J. Allen Hynek was considered by
his colleagues to be the pre-eminent authority on UFO phenomena. Hynek
became involved with UFOs as Scientific Consultant to the U.S. Air Force
from 1948 to 1968. He was the first speaker to present testimony at the 1968
hearing on UFOs held by the House Committee on Science and Astronautics
and later appeared before the United Nations to support the proposed
establishment of an agency to conduct and coordinate research into UFOs and
related phenomena.
In the early 1970s, Hynek coined the phrase “close encounters of the third
kind,” and acted as technical advisor to director Steven Spielberg on the movie
of the same name. Hynek founded CUFOS (the Center for UFO Studies) in
1973 and served as its director until his death in 1986.
For more than twenty years Dr. Hynek served as astronomical consultant to
the U. S. Air Force Projects Sign and Blue Book, which processed and studied
UFO sightings reported to Air Force bases. He came to Northwestern
University in 1960 from his position as associate director of the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was in
charge of the U. S. Optical Satellite Tracking Program. He was responsible for
the precise tracking of man’s first artificial satellite, as well as for some 270
volunteer “Moonwatch” stations in various countries.
A native of Chicago, Hynek has had many illustrious posts in his scientific
career. After receiving his doctorate in astronomy from the University of
Chicago, he was, in turn: professor of astronomy and director of the McMillin
Observatory at Ohio State University; supervisor of technical reports at the
Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University during World War
II; assistant dean of the Graduate School at Ohio State and professor of
astronomy after the war; and lecturer in astronomy at Harvard during the four
years he was associate director of the Smithsonian’s Observatory in Cambridge;
after which he joined Northwestern University as chairman of the Department
of Astronomy and director of the Dearborn Observatory, posts he held for
fifteen years. During his tenure he was instrumental in the founding of the
Lindheimer Astronomical Research Center and served as its first director.
J. Allen Hynek
Dr. Hynek has published numerous technical papers in astrophysics and is

the author of several textbooks. He is also the author of The UFO Experience:
A Scientific Inquiry (1972), The Hynek Report of UFOs (1977), and coauthor
(with Jacques Vallée) of The Edge of Reality (1975).
POSITION STATEMENT: In an interview for Fate magazine (June 1976 issue),

Hynek stated his position on the UFO problem as follows:
The conclusion I’ve come to after all these years is that first of all, the
subject is much more complex than any of us imagined. It has paranormal
aspects but certainly it has very real physical aspects, too. The attitude
we’re taking in the Center for UFO Studies is that since we’re going to have
scientists involved, we will push the physical approach as hard and far as
we can—instrumentation, physical evidence, photographs, radar records. If
we are finally forced by the evidence itself to go into the paranormal, then
we will.
And in another interview, he expressed these views (from Lumières dans la Nuit,
issue No. 168 of October 1977):
[The extraterrestrial] theory runs up against a very big difficulty, namely,

that we are seeing too many UFOs. The Earth is only a spot of dust in the
Universe. Why should it be honored with so many visits?
INTERVIEWER: Then what is your hypothesis?
HYNEK: I am more inclined to think in terms of something metaterrestrial, a
sort of parallel reality.
INTERVIEWER: And what then is your personal conviction?
HYNEK: I have the impression that the UFOs are announcing a change that
is coming soon in our scientific paradigms. I am very much afraid that
UFOs are related to certain psychic phenomena. And if I say “I am very
much afraid,” this is because in our Center at Evanston we are trying to
study this problem from the angle of the physical sciences.
...But it would be absurd to follow up only one path to the exclusion of all
others.
This theory was repeated again, when Hynek was interviewed by Newsweek:
“UFO’s, he says, may be psychic phenomena and the ‘aliens’ may not come
from outer space but from a ‘parallel reality’.” (November 21, 1977)
In yet another interview (for the April 3, 1978 issue of Today’s Student), Hynek
added that:
Certainly the phenomenon has psychic aspects. I don’t talk about them very
much because to a general audience the words “psychic” and “occult” have
bad overtones. They say, “Aw, it’s all crazy.” But the fact is that there are
psychic things; for instance, UFOs seem to materialize and dematerialize.
There are people who’ve had UFO experiences who’ve claimed to have
developed psychic ability. There have been reported cases of hearings in
close encounters and there have been reported cases of precognition, where
people had foreknowledge or forewarning that they were going to see
something. There has been a change of outlook, a change of philosophy of
persons’ lives. Now, you see, those are rather tricky things to talk about
openly, but it’s there.
Many people, like Jacques Vallée and I, to some extent, feel that it might
be a conditioning process.
Hynek UFO Report, The book (Dell, 1977). Dr. J. Allen Hynek concludes in
this book that whatever UFOs are, they want to play games with us and lead us
on a confusing chase. He also demonstrates from his own experiences as a
consultant to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book that the U.S. Air Force
intentionally deceived and lied to the American public about its UFO
investigations.
hypnosis, use of, in UFO investigations Hypnosis has often been discussed
and used as one tool available to the UFO investigator, as well as to the
criminal investigator and, of course, the psychological therapist. The history of
hypnosis is characterized by trends from physical to physiological to
psychological explanations of hypnotic phenomena. Although many theories
about the nature of hypnosis have been advanced, no one theory has been
accepted by all theorists. Despite many differences in theoretical positions,
most researchers describe hypnosis in terms of psychological processes which
are related to interpersonal situations and to personal abilities of participants.
Good hypnotic subjects are described as persons who (1) can respond to
suggestions for deep relaxation, (2) have vivid imaginations, (3) are able to
minimize temporarily their awareness of “external” reality and, (4) can
maximize temporarily an alternate or “internal” reality. These persons can learn
to alter their perceptions of “pain,” “time,” “memory,” etc. Autohypnosis, or
self-hypnosis, seems to be the primary experience, with assistance from a guide
or teacher as a possible facilitator in the process. There seems to be no danger
inherent in the use of hypnotic processes, but there may be a risk in accepting
and following suggestions from an inexperienced or poorly trained hypnotist.
Experimental studies have yielded results which cast doubt on the view that
hypnotic time-regression (age regression) procedures can cause a participant to
“relive” the experiences of earlier events. On the other hand, these studies have
shown that many individuals have the potential to use hypnotic suggestions to
increase their recall of “forgotten” memories.
Along with other controversies about the UFO problem, there are
disagreements among UFO investigators about the value of hypnotic time-
regression procedures in the investigation of UFO experiences. Despite the
difficulties in evaluating information which is obtained during hypnotic
sessions, most investigators agree that hypnotic procedures may be useful in
exploring the available testimony of UFO witnesses.
A list of possible uses of hypnotic procedures in UFO investigations could
include the following activities:
1. Assisting UFO witnesses to relax deeply and to reduce any anxiety which
may be associated with their UFO experiences.
2. Instructing UFO witnesses to elicit ideomotor responses (by use of the
pendulum technique or through finger-and-thumb responses) for
communication with the “subconscious mind,” or subconscious processes.
3. Encouraging UFO witnesses to release any repressed memory about an
amnesic period, or “loss of time” experience during a UFO sighting,
including possible memories of apparent abduction, examination, and/ or
experimentation by UFO occupants.
4. Checking the consistency of conscious and subconscious information from
the UFO witnesses, and comparing these claims with information about the
backgrounds of witnesses and other information about their UFO
experiences.
5. Training interested persons to obtain possible “psychic impressions,” e.g.,
clairvoyant impressions of UFO occupants, telepathic communications with
UFO occupants, and precognitive impressions or impressions of future
events.
The information that has been obtained from hypnotic sessions with
participants who claim UFO experiences, including abduction and
communication with UFO occupants, is tentative and inconclusive. At present,
there seem to be five general hypotheses to account for these reports:
1. UFO witnesses are lying. Evidence to support this hypothesis might be

obtained by conducting background investigations and polygraph
examinations.
2. UFO witnesses are experiencing neurotic or psychotic reactions. Evidence
for this hypothesis might be obtained by conducting psychiatric evaluations.
3. UFO witnesses are submitting information which stems from fantasies or
daydreams. Evidence for this hypothesis might be obtained from
psychological evaluation of the witnesses, and from comparisons of their
experiences with other information about UFO reports.
4. UFO witnesses are submitting information which is desired by the UFO
investigator. Evidence for this hypothesis can be obtained by employing
consultants in hypnosis who do not share the same biases about the
significance and meaning of UFO experiences.
5. UFO witnesses are submitting reliable and/or valid information Evidence
for this hypothesis can be obtained by comparing the testimony of UFO
witnesses with the pattern of evidence obtained from other UFO
investigations.
In conclusion, hypnotic procedures offer a method for exploring some of the

puzzling areas of UFO phenomena. Hypnotic techniques can be used for a
variety of tasks, depending upon the needs and the interests of UFO witnesses,
UFO investigators, and consultants in hypnosis. Despite the difficulties of
evaluating information obtained from hypnotic procedures, the experienced
UFO investigator should encourage the UFO witness to consider possible
participation in hypnotic sessions for further investigation of his or her UFO
experience.
—R.LEO SPRINKLE
ANOTHER VIEW: In France in the 1770s, when Mesmerism was in its heyday,
the king appointed two commissions to investigate Mesmer’s activities. The
commissions included such eminent men as Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier, and
Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the French astronomer. After months of study the report of
the commissioners concluded that it was imagination, not magnetism, that
accounted for the swooning, trancelike rigidity of Mesmer’s subjects.
Surprisingly enough, this conclusion is still closer to the truth about hypnosis
than most of the modern definitions found in today’s textbooks.
So-called authorities still disagree about “hypnosis.” But whether it is or is
not a “state,” there is common and widespread agreement among all the major
disputants that “hypnosis” is a situation in which people set aside critical
judgment (without abandoning it entirely) and engage in make-believe and
fantasy; that is, they use their imagination (Sarbin and Andersen, 1967; Barber,
1969; Gill and Brenman, 1959; Hilgard, 1977).
Josephine Hilgard (1979) refers to hypnosis as “imaginative involvement,”
Sarbin and Coe (1972) term it “believed-in imaginings,” Spanos and Barber
(1974) call it “involvement in suggestion-related imaginings,” and Sutcliffe
(1961) has gone so far as to characterize the hypnotizable individual as
someone who is “deluded in a descriptive, nonpejorative sense” and he sees the
hypnotic situation as an arena in which people who are skilled at make-believe
and fantasy are provided with the opportunity and the means to do what they
enjoy doing and what they are able to do especially well. Even more recently
Perry, Laurence, Nadon, and Labelle (1986) concluded that “abilities such as
imagery/imagination, absorption, disassociation, and selective attention
underlie high hypnotic responsivity in yet undetermined combinations.” The
same authors, in another context dealing with past-lives regression, also
concluded that “it should be expected that any material provided in age
regression (which is at the basis of reports of reincarnation) may be fact or
fantasy, and it is most likely an admixture of both.” The authors further report
that such regression material is colored by issues of confabulation, memory
creation, inadvertent cueing, and the regressee’s current psychological needs.
CONFABULATION
Because of its universality, it is quite surprising that the phenomenon of

confabulation is not better known. Confabulation, or the tendency of ordinary,
sane individuals to confuse fact with fiction and to report fantasized events as
actual occurrences, has surfaced in just about every situation in which a person
has attempted to remember very specific details from the past. A classical and
amusing example occurs in the movie Gigi, in the scene where Maurice
Chevalier and Hermione Gingold compare memories of their courtship in the
song “I Remember It Well.” We remember things not the way they really were
but the way we would have liked them to have been.
The work of Elizabeth Loftus and others over the past decade has
demonstrated that the human memory works not like a tape recorder but more
like the village storyteller—i.e., it is both creative and recreative. We can and
we do easily forget. We blur, shape, erase, and change details of the events in
our past. Many people walk around daily with heads full of “fake memories.”
The unreliability of “eyewitness testimony” is not only legendary but well
documented.
All of this is further complicated and compounded by the impact of
suggestions provided by the hypnotist—supposedly “regressing” the subject—
plus the social demand characteristics of the typical hypnotic situation. Under
such conditions, there is little wonder that the resulting “recall” on the part of
the regressee bears no resemblance to the truth. In fact, the regressee often does
not know what the truth is.
Confabulation shows up without fail in nearly every context in which
hypnosis is employed, including the forensic area. Thus it is not surprising that
most states have no legal precedents on the use of hypnotic testimony.
Furthermore, many state courts have begun to limit testimony from hypnotized
witnesses or to follow the guidelines laid down by the American Medical
Association in 1985 to assure that witnesses’ memories are not contaminated by
the hypnosis itself. For not only do we translate beliefs into memories when we
are wide awake, but in the case of hypnotized witnesses with few specific
memories, the hypnotist may unwittingly suggest memories and create a
witness with a number of crucial and vivid recollections of events that never
happened, i.e., pseudo-memories. It may turn out that the recent Supreme Court
decision allowing the individual states limited use of hypnotically aided
testimony may not be in the best interests of those who seek the truth. Even in
their decision the judges recognized that hypnosis may often produce incorrect
recollections and unreliable testimony.
There have also been a number of clinical and experimental demonstrations
of the creation of pseudo-memories that have subsequently come to be believed
as veridical. Hilgard (1981) implanted a false memory of an experience
connected with a bank robbery that never occurred. His subject found the
experience so vivid that he was able to select from a series of photographs a
picture of the man he thought had committed the robbery. At another time,
Hilgard deliberately assigned two concurrent—though spatially different—life
experiences to the same person and regressed him at separate times to that date.
The individual subsequently gave very accurate accounts of both experiences,
so that anyone believing in reincarnation who reviewed the two accounts would
conclude the man really had lived the two assigned lives.
In a number of other experiments designed to measure eyewitness reliability,
Loftus (1979) found that details supplied by others invariably contaminated the
memory of the eyewitness. People’s hair changed color, “stop” signs became
“yield” signs, yellow convertibles turned to red sedans, the left side of the street
became the right side, and so on. The results of these studies led her to
conclude, “It may well be that the legal notion of an independent recollection is
a psychological impossibility.” As for hypnosis, she says: “There’s no way
even the most sophisticated hypnotist can tell the difference between a memory
that is real and one that’s created. If a person is hypnotized and highly
suggestible and false information is implanted in his mind, it may get
embedded even more strongly. One psychologist tried to use a polygraph to
distinguish between real and phony memory, but it didn’t work. Once someone
has constructed a memory, he comes to believe it himself.”
CUEING
Without a doubt, inadvertent cueing also plays a major role in UFO-

abduction fantasies. The hypnotist unintentionally gives away to the person
being regressed exactly what response is wanted. This was most clearly shown
in an experimental study of hypnotic age regression by R. M. True in 1949. He
found that 92 percent of his subjects regressed to the day of their tenth birthday,
and could accurately recall the day of the week on which it fell. He also found
the same thing for 84 percent of his subjects for their fourth birthday. Other
investigators, however, were unable to duplicate True’s findings. When True
was questioned by Martin Orne about his experiment, he discovered that the
editors of Science, where his report had appeared, altered his procedure section
without his prior consent. True, Orne discovered, had inadvertently cued his
subjects by following the unusual technique of asking them, “Is it Monday? Is
it Tuesday? Is it Wednesday?” etc., and he monitored their responses by using a
perpetual desk calendar in full view of all his subjects. Further evidence of the
prevalence and importance of such cueing came from a study by O’ Connell,
Shor, and Orne (1970). They found that in an existing group of four-year-olds,
not a single one knew what day of the week it was. The reincarnation literature
is also replete with examples of such inadvertent cueing. Ian Wilson (1981), for
example, has shown that hypnotically elicited reports of being reincarnated
vary as a direct function of the hypnotist’s belief about reincarnation. Finally,
Laurence, Nadon, Nogrady, and Perry (1986) have shown that pseudo-
memories were elicited also by inadvertent cueing in the use of hypnosis by the
police.
As for advertent, or deliberate, cueing, one of my own studies offers a clear
example. Sixty undergraduates divided into three groups of twenty each were
hypnotized and age-regressed to previous lifetimes. Before each hypnosis
session, however, suggestions very favorable to and supportive of past-life and
reincarnation beliefs were given to one group; neutral and noncommittal
statements about past lives were given to the second group; and skeptical and
derogatory statements about past lives were given to the third group. The
results clearly showed the effects of these cues and suggestions. Subjects in the
first group showed the most pastlife regressions and the most past-life
productions; subjects in the third group showed the least. (Baker 1982)
Regression subjects take cues as to how they are to respond from the person
doing the regressions and asking the questions. If the hypnotist is a believer in
UFO abductions, the odds are heavily in favor of him eliciting UFO-abductee
stories from his volunteers.
FANTASY-PRONE
PERSONALITIES AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS
“Assuming that all you have said thus far is true,” the skeptical observer
might ask, “why would hundreds of ordinary, mild-mannered, unassuming
citizens suddenly go off the deep end and turn up with cases of amnesia and
then, when under hypnosis, all report nearly identical experiences?” First, the
abductees are not as numerous as we are led to believe; and, second, even
though bestselling UFO-abduction authors Whitley Strieber and Budd Hopkins
go to great lengths to emphasize the diversity of the people who report these
events, they are much more alike than these taxonomists declare. In an
afterword to Hopkins’s Missing Time, a psychologist named Aphrodite Clamar
raises exactly this question and then adds, “All of these people seem quite
ordinary in the psychological sense—although they have not been subjected to
the kind of psychological testing that might provide a deeper understanding of
their personalities.” (emphasis added). And herein lies the problem. If these
abductees were given this sort of intensive diagnostic testing, it is highly likely
that many similarities would emerge—particularly an unusual personality
pattern that Wilson and Barber (1983) have categorized as “fantasy-prone.” In
an important but much neglected article, they report in some detail their
discovery of a group of excellent hypnotic subjects with unusual fantasy
abilities. In their words:
Although this study provided a broader understanding of the kind of life
experiences that may underlie the ability to be an excellent hypnotic
subject, it has also led to a serendipitous finding that has wide implication
for all of psychology—it has shown that there exists a small group of
individuals (possibly 4% of the population) who fantasize a large part of the
time, who typically “see,” “hear,” “smell,” and “touch” and fully experience
what they fantasize; and who can be labeled fantasy-prone personalities.
(Wilson and Barber, 1983)
Wilson and Barber also stress that such individuals experience a reduction in
orientation to time, place, and person that is characteristic of hypnosis or trance
during their daily lives whenever they are deeply involved in a fantasy. They
also have experiences during their daily ongoing lives that resemble the
classical hypnotic phenomena. In other words, the behavior we would normally
call “hypnotic” is exhibited by these fantasy-prone types (FPs) all the time. In
Wilson and Barber’s words: “When we give them ‘hypnotic suggestions,’ such
as suggestions for visual and auditory hallucinations, negative hallucinations,
age regression, limb rigidity, anesthesia, and sensory hallucinations, we are
asking them to do for us the kind of thing they can do independently of us in
their daily lives.”
The reason we do not run into these types more often is that they have
learned long ago to be highly secretive and private about their fantasy lives.
Whenever the FPs do encounter a hypnosis situation it provides them with a
social situation in which they are encouraged to do, and are rewarded for doing,
what they usually do only in secrecy and in private. Wilson and Barber also
emphasize that regression and the reliving of previous experiences is something
that virtually all the FPs do naturally in their daily lives. When they recall the
past, they relive it to a surprisingly vivid extent, and they all have vivid
memories of their experiences extending back to their early years.
Fantasy-prone individuals also show up as mediums, psychics, and religious
visionaries. They are also the ones who have many realistic “out-of-body”
experiences and prototypic “near-death” experiences.
In spite of the fact that many such extreme types show FP characteristics, the
overwhelming majority of FPs fall within the broad range of “normal
functioning.” It is totally inappropriate to apply a psychiatric diagnosis to them.
In Wilson and Barber’s words: “It needs to be strongly emphasized that our
subjects with a propensity for hallucinations are as well adjusted as our
comparison group or the average person. It appears that the life experiences and
skill developments that underlie the ability of hallucinatory fantasy are more or
less independent of the kinds of life experience that leads to pathology.” In
general, FPs are “normal” people who function as well as others and who are as
well adjusted, competent, and satisfied or dissatisfied as everyone else.
Anyone familiar with the the fantasy-prone personality who reads Whitley
Strieber’s book Communion will experience an immediate shock of
recognition. Strieber is a classic example of the genre: he is easily hypnotized;
he is amnesiac; he has vivid memories of his early life, body immobility and
rigidity, a very religious background, a very active fantasy life (he is a writer of
occult and highly imaginative novels); he has unusually strong sensory
experiences—particularly smells and sounds—and vivid dreams. But even
more remarkable are the correspondences between Strieber’s alien encounters
and the typical hypnopompic hallucinations to be discussed shortly.
It is perfectly clear, therefore, why most of the UFO abductees, when given
cursory examinations by psychiatrists and psychologists, would turn out to be
ordinary, normal citizens as sane as themselves. It is also evident why the
elaborate fantasies woven in fine cloth from the now universally familiar UFO-
abduction fable—a fable known to every man, woman, and child newspaper
reader or movie-goer in the nation—would have so much in common, so much
consistency in the telling. Any one of us, if asked to pretend that he had been
kidnapped by aliens from outer space or another dimension, would make up a
story that would vary little, either in its details or in the supposed motives of the
abductors, from the stories told by any and all of the kidnap victims reported by
Hopkins. As for the close encounters of the third kind and conversations with
the little gray aliens described in Communion and Intruders, again, our
imaginative tales would be remarkably similar in plot, dialogue, description,
and characterization. The means of transportation would be saucer-shaped; the
aliens would be small, humanoid, two-eyed, and gray, white, or tan. The
purpose of their visits would be: (1) to save our planet; (2) to find a better home
for themselves; (3) to end nuclear war and the threat we pose to the peaceful
life in the rest of galaxy; (4) to bring us knowledge and enlightenment; and (5)
to increase their knowledge and understanding of other forms of intelligent
life. In fact, the fantasy-prone abductees’ stories would be much more credible
if some of them, at least, reported the aliens as eight-foot-tall, red-striped
octapeds riding bicycles and intent upon eating us for dessert.
Finally, what would or could motivate even the FPs to concoct such
outlandish and absurd tales that without fail draw much unwelcome attention
and notoriety? What sort of psychological motives and needs would underlie
such fabrications? Perhaps the best answer to this question is the one provided
by the author-photographer Douglas Curran. Traveling from British Columbia
down the West Coast and circumscribing the United States along a
counterclockwise route, Curran spent more than two years questioning ordinary
people about outer space. Curran writes:
On my travels across the continent I never had to wait too long for
someone to tell me about his or her UFO experience, whether I was chatting
with a farmer in Kansas, Ruth Norman at the Unarius Foundation, or a cafe
owner in Florida. What continually struck me in talking with these people
was how positive and ultimately life-giving a force was their belief in outer
space. Their belief reaffirmed the essential fact of human existence: the
need for order and hope. It is this that establishes them—and me—in the
continuity of human experience. It brought to me a greater understanding of
Oscar Wilde’s observation. “We are all lying in the gutter—but some of us
are looking at the stars.”
Jung (1969), in his study of flying saucers, first published in 1957, argues
that the saucer represents an archetype of order, wholeness, deliverance, and
salvation—a symbol manifested in other cultures as a sun wheel or magic
circle. Further in his essay, Jung compares the spacemen aboard the flying
saucers to the angelic messengers of earlier times who brought messages of
hope and salvation—the theme emphasized in Strieber’s Communion. Curran
also observes that the spiritual message conveyed by the aliens is, recognizably,
our own. None of the aliens Curran’s contactees talked about advocated any
moral or metaphysical belief that was not firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian
tradition. As Curran says, “Every single flying saucer group I encountered in
my travels incorporated Jesus Christ into the hierarchy of its belief system.”
Many theorists have long recognized that whenever world events prove to be
psychologically destabilizing, men turn to religion as their only hope. Jung,
again, in his 1957 essay, wrote: “In the threatening situation of the world today,
when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-
creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organization and powers into
the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods,
once had their abode in the planets.”
The beauty and power of Curran’s portraits of hundreds of true UFO
believers lies in his sympathetic understanding of their fears and frailties. As
psychologists are well aware, our religions are not so much systems of
objective truths about the universe as they are collections of subjective
statements about humanity’s hopes and fears. The true believers interviewed by
Curran are all around us. Over the years I have encountered several. One
particularly memorable and poignant case was that of a federal prisoner who
said he could leave his body at will and sincerely believed it. Every weekend he
would go home to visit his family, while his physical body stayed behind in his
cell. Then there was the female psychic from the planet Xenon who could turn
electric lights on and off at will, especially traffic signals. Proof of her powers?
If she drove up to a red light she would concentrate on it intently for thirty to
forty seconds and then, invariably, it would turn green!
HYPNAGOGIC AND HYPNOPOMPIC HALLUCINATIONS
Another common yet little publicized and rarely discussed phenomenon is

that of hypnagogic (when falling asleep) and hypnopompic (when waking up)
hallucinations. These phenomena, often referred to as “waking dreams,” find
the individual suddenly awake, but paralyzed, unable to move, and most often
encountering a “ghost.” The typical report goes somewhat as follows: “I went
to bed and then sometime near morning something woke me up. I opened my
eyes and found myself wide awake but unable to move. There, standing at the
foot of my bed was my mother, wearing her favorite dress—the one we buried
her in. She stood there looking at me and smiling and then she said: ‘Don’t
worry about me, Doris, I’m at peace at last. I just want you and the children to
be happy.’” Well, what happened next? “Nothing, she slowly faded away.”
What did you do then? “Nothing, I just closed my eyes and went back to
sleep.”
There are always a number of characteristic clues that indicate a hypnagogic
or hypnopompic hallucination. First, it always occurs before or after falling
asleep. Second, one is paralyzed or has difficulty in moving; or, contrarily, one
may float out of one’s body and have an out-of-body experience. Third, the
hallucination is unusually bizarre; i.e., one sees ghosts, aliens, monsters, and
such. Fourth, after the hallucination is over, the hallucinator typically goes back
to sleep. And, fifth, the hallucinator is unalterably convinced of the “reality” of
the entire experience.
Strieber’s Communion provides a classic textbook description of a
hypnopompic hallucination, complete with the awakening from a sound sleep,
the strong sense of reality and of being awake, the paralysis (due to the fact that
the body’s neural circuits keep our muscles relaxed and help preserve our
sleep), and the encounter with strange beings. Following the encounter, instead
of jumping out of bed and going in search of the strangers he has seen, Strieber
typically goes back to sleep. He even reports that the burglar alarm was still
working—proof again that the intruders were mental rather than physical.
Strieber also reports an occasion when he awakens and believes that the roof of
his house is on fire and that the aliens are threatening his family. Yet his only
response to this was to go peacefully back to sleep. Again, clear evidence of a
hypnopompic dream. Strieber, of course, is convinced of the reality of these
experiences. This too is to be expected. If he was not convinced of their reality,
then the experience would not be hypnopompic or hallucinatory.
The point cannot be more strongly made that ordinary, perfectly sane and
rational people have these hallucinatory experiences and that such individuals
are in no way mentally disturbed or psychotic. But neither are such experiences
to be taken as incontrovertible proof of some sort of objective or consensual
reality. They may be subjectively real, but objectively they are nothing more
than dreams or delusions. They are called “hallucinatory” because of their
heightened subjective reality. Leaving no rational explanation unspurned,
Strieber is nevertheless forthright enough to suggest at one point the possibility
that his experiences indeed could be hypnopompic. Moreover, in a summary
chapter he speculates, correctly, that the alien visitors could be “from within
us” and/or “a side effect of a natural phenomenon ... a certain hallucinatory
wire in the mind causing many different people to have experiences so similar
as to seem to be the result of encounters with the same physical phenomena”
(Strieber, 1987).
Interestingly enough, these hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations do
show individual differences in content and character as well as a lot of
similarity: ghosts, monsters, fairies, friends, lovers, neighbors, and even little
gray men and golden-haired ladies from the Pleiades are frequently
encountered. Do such hallucinations appear more frequently to highly
imaginative and fantasy-prone people than to other personality types? There is
some evidence that they do (McKellar, 1957; Tart, 1969; Reed, 1972; Wilson
and Barber, 1983), and there can certainly be no doubt that Strieber is a highly
imaginative personality type. (See also IMAGINARY ABDUCTEE STUDY)
—ROBERT A. BAKER
References
Alcock, James. Parapsychology: Science or Magic? (Pergamon, 1981).
AMA Council on Scientific Affairs. “Scientific Status of Refreshing Recollection by Use of Hypnosis,”
Journal AMA (April 5, 1985).
Baker, Robert A. “The Effect of Suggestion on Past-Lives Regression.” American Journal of Clinical
Hypnosis (1982).
Baker, Robert A., Haynes, B., and Patrick, B. “Hypnosis, Memory, and Incidental Memory,” American
Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (1983).
Barber, Theodore X. Hypnosis: A Scientific Approach (Van Nostrand, 1969).
Corliss, William R. The Unfathomed Mind: A Handbook of Unusual Mental Phenomena (Sourcebook,
1982).
Curran, Douglas. In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space (Abbeville Press,1985).
Frazier, Kendrick, ed. Paranormal Borderlands of Science (Prometheus Books. 1981).
Gill, M. M., and Brenman, M. Hypnosis and Related Slates (International Universities Press, 1959).
Hilgard, Ernest R. Divided Consciousness: Multiple Controls in Human Thought and Action (John Wiley
& Sons, 1977).
_____. “Hypnosis Gives Rise to Fantasy and Is Not a Truth Serum,” Skeptical Inquirer (Spring, 1981).
Hilgard, Josephine R. Personality and Hypnosis: A Study of Imaginative Involvement, 2nd ed. (University
of Chicago Press, 1979).
Loftus, Elizabeth. Eyewitness Testimony. (Harvard University Press, 1979).
McKellar, Peter. Imagination and Thinking (Cohen and West, 1957).
O’Connell, D. N., Shor, R. E., and Ome, M. T. “Hypnotic Age Regression: An Empirical and
Methodological Analysis,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology Monograph 76 (1970).
Perry, Campbell, Laurence, Jean-Roch, Nadon, Robert, and Labelle, Louise. “Past-Lives Regression” in
Hypnosis: Questions and Answers. Zilbergeld, Bernie; and Edelstein, M. G.; and Araoz, D. L., eds.
(Norton, 1986).
Reed, Graham. The Psychology of Anomalous Experience (Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
Sarbin, T. R. and Andersen, M. L. “Role-theoretical Analysis of Hypnotic Behavior” in Handbook of
Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, Gordon, Jesse E., ed. (Macmillan,1967).
Sarbin, T. R. and Coe, W. C. Hypnosis: A Social Psychological Analysis of Influence Communication
(Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).
Spanos, N. R, and Barber, T. X. “Toward a Convergence in Hypnotic Research,” American Psychologist
(1974).
Strieber, Whitley. Communion (William Morrow/Beech Tree Books, 1987).
Sutcliffe, J. P. “ ‘Credulous’ and ‘Skeptical’ Views of Hypnotic Phenomena: Experiments on Esthesia,
Hallucinations, and Delusion” Journal of Abnormnal and Social Psychology (1961).
Tart, Charles, ed.. Altered States of Consciousness: A Book of Readings (Wiley, 1969).
True, R. M. “Experimental Control in Hypnotic Age Regression States,” Science (1949).
Wilson, Ian. Mind Out of Time (Gollancz, 1981).
Wilson, Sheryl C. and Barber, Theodore. X. “The Fantasy-Prone Personality: Implications for
Understanding Imagery, Hypnosis, and Parapsychological Phenomena” in Imagery: Current Theory,
Research and Application. Sheikh, Agnees A., ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 1983).
I
iatrogenesis One of the real tragedies of modern medical practice is the

unintentional creation of a new, or, in many cases, a more serious and disabling
disorder by the therapist’s misguided efforts to heal. Such disorders created by
the physician or therapist are called iatrogenic from the Greek iatros meaning
“healer.”
Sadly enough, the prevalence and extent of such disorders is much greater
than is generally thought, especially in the area of psychiatric and
psychological disorders. During the late 1980s and 1990s a number of
misguided psychotherapists and pseudothearpists have been persuading people
they are victims of “alien abductions.” The engineering processes and
procedures used to accomplish this iatrogenic feat of construction are fairly
easy.
The needed materials are: a person with a problem of some sort seeking an
answer; a therapist, counselor, or guru; social compliance on the part of the
person with the problem; a number of suggestions from the therapist; and
finally, a total relaxation of the reins of the client’s imagination. This
combination results in what is usually referred to as “hypnosis” or “trance”—
terms which are both inaccurate and misleading, since creating or using “the
hypnotic ritual” is unnecessary. In most instances, most people can be
persuaded to relax, close their eyes, take slow deep breaths, and follow the
therapist’s suggestions. Nearly everyone possesses some degree of intelligence,
imagination, and memory; and although some individuals are more suggestive
than others, all of us, without exception, are prone to being influenced by
suggestion. When these factors are combined with a therapist’s stimulation of
memory (which is virtually indistinguishable from imagination), what emerges
ninety nine times out of a hundred is a mixture of both fact and fiction. Our
memories are never 100 percent accurate, and the further away in time we are
from the event we are trying to recall, the less accurate our account will be.
When a dominant and persuasive therapist suggests to his patients who are
in a relaxed and susceptible state that they were “abducted by aliens,” the ideas
become “memory” and a an iatrogenic disorder is born.
—ROBERT A. BAKER
Imaginary Abductee Study The Imaginary Abductee Study is one of the few
scientific experiments ever conducted in the history of UFO-abduction
research. We developed the 1977 imaginary series for several reasons. We
needed more information about abductions, and the study promised us narrative
data from fantasized CE-3s (close encounters of the third kind) in a convenient
synthetic form. We also wanted to learn more about using hypnosis effectively
in such cases. Above all, we were dissatisfied with several inconclusive
previous real CE-3s, and we sought ways to determine whether or not
abductees were fabricating.
My colleague Dr. W.C. McCall and I were increasingly doubtful about
abduction claims, which had proliferated during and after the 1973 UFO flap.
We still remembered the 1975 Garden Grove abduction hoax, which had
changed us abruptly from believers to skeptics. Neither of us cared whether
abductees’ claims were caused by aliens or not, yet we continued our
investigations with new enthusiasm.
Over the spring and summer of 1977, we found sixteen volunteers who
knew relatively nothing about UFOs or CE-3 literature, hypnotized them, and
gave each an imaginary abduction. We asked them eight simple questions
(derived from events in a few dozen published and manuscript CE-3 cases then
available) and directed them to respond fluently:
1) Imagine you are in a favorite place, and suddenly you see a UFO. Describe
that UFO.
2) Imagine you are aboard the UFO. How do you get there?
3) Imagine you are inside the UFO. What do you see?
4) Imagine you see some beings in the UFO. What do they look like?
5) Imagine the beings give you a physical examination. What is happening?
6) Imagine they give you a message. What does the message say, and how do
you get it?
7) Imagine you return to where you sighted the UFO. How do you get there?
8) Imagine an aftermath. How were you affected by your abduction? (Subject
is awakened.)
We assumed the imaginary subjects would need much prompting but they
had been selected for creativity and high verbal skills and were good hypnotic
subjects, going readily into deep trance and responding well to questions.
McCall never deliberately cued them beyond introducing each situation, and
then let them talk freely with no more guidance than an occasional “What’s
happening now?” Almost all sixteen imaginary subjects gave us detailed and
often intriguing narratives that were fully comparable to those in CE-3 case
reports.
Word-by-word comparisons with real abduction transcripts showed many
similarities and few major differences. All of the imaginary subjects described
typical CE-3 images and incidents, ranging from the obvious (disk-shaped
craft) to the unusual (two alien types on a single UFO), to rare details of high
strangeness (projecting/retracting light beams with cut-off ends). The hundreds
of similarities are too numerous and characteristic to be dismissed. One
Imaginary subject described a (non-existent) “scoop mark” on her arm put there
by an alien—years before such abductee body scars became fashionable.
Further, all six types of aliens commonly described by pre-1980s CE-3
witnesses appeared in just the first eight imaginary sessions: human, humanoid,
animal, robot, exotic, and apparitional. There were no bug-eyed Grays among
these entities.
Responses to the Imaginary study generally followed predictable paths —
abduction skeptics welcomed it, while those abduction proponents who did not
ignore it attacked us variously for cueing our subjects, for finding trivial
imaginary/real parallels, or for flawed methodology, among other things. The
objections seemed to us then as now to be mostly nit picking by true believers.
The study’s core assertion, that CE-3 claims are mental events, remains
unsullied—particularly in the absence of any serious attempts at replication,
even after a near quarter-century.
One of our critics agreed with us in part. In 1989 longtime proponent
Thomas Bullard called for a replication of the Imaginary Study, then
concluded: “Imaginary cases thus pose a vexing question—how can non-
abductees tell stories even broadly like those of real abductees?... More to the
point, how can the hypothesis of an objective abduction survive if anyone can
tell the abduction story, no experience required?”
How indeed? Some maintain that the general outlines of a CE-3 are “in the
air”—in TV, film, and print versions of abduction cases. But in 1977 such
sources were far fewer, and can not account for the capacity of nearly any
imaginary subject even today to fantasize a fully detailed CE-3 yarn, including
specifics that few abductees describe, about any given segment of the abduction
sequence. The imaginaries seemed to possess intuitive knowledge of an
abduction sequence they had never consciously experienced. The origin of such
knowledge must be innate, and I think it almost certainly has to relate to
perinatal memories.
The Imaginary Study’s significance is that it provided the first persuasive
demonstration that claims of abduction are non-physical experiences, i.e.,
hoaxes or fantasy/hallucinations rather than physical events. The study
continues to perturb abduction proponents, but even independent replications if
they occur are unlikely to modify its skeptical conclusions.
—ALVIN H. LAWSON
All six types of aliens commonly described by pre-1980s CE-3 witnesses appeared in the early
imaginary sessions: human, humanoid, animal, robot, exotic, and apparitional. Missing were the
big-eyed Grays that became so prominent in the late 1980s.
implants, alien For many years the subject of alien implants in humans has not
only intrigued abduction researchers, but attempts to isolate and study these
objects have been fraught with disappointment and failure. The situation
changed in 1995 when I became acquainted with Derrel Sims, a long-time
researcher in the alien abduction field.
On August 19, 1995, the first set of surgeries was performed for the removal
of objects from the bodies of two individuals who were subjects of the alien-
abduction phenomenon. The recovered objects were subjected to scientific
analysis of both the biological and nonbiological material, and the findings
were baffling. There was a second set of surgeries performed on May 18, 1996.
The total number to date is now eight surgeries which has netted nine objects.
The first surgeries were performed on a male patient whose x-rays
demonstrated an object in his hand and one female with two obvious metallic
objects in a toe that were also demonstrative in x-rays. There was an additional
surgery following the first set that yielded a small grayish white ball. This was
followed by a set of three surgeries. Two were female and one was male. Both
females showed radiographic signs of objects beneath the skin on the front of
the left leg, whereas the male patient had a metallic radiographic object in the
left jaw area. Following this set of surgeries another independent procedure was
performed on a female who had an object in her left heel. The last surgery to
date was performed on August 17, 1998, and was filmed by NBC to be
included in their two-hour prime-time special, which aired on February 17,
1999.
Because of the expense incurred from the scientific analysis in world class
laboratories, a method had to be devised to raise money. All the surgical
procedures performed were without charge to the patient, and the scientific data
found eventually becomes the property of all the Earth’s inhabitants. Derrel
Sims and I have formed an organization, which serves both functions. It is a
nonprofit organization called: The Fund For Interactive Research in Space
Technology, (F.I.R.S.T.). The Website address is www.Firstevidence.org.
Another nonprofit organization deals with the matter of scientific analysis.
This is The National Institute for Discovery Science (N.I.D.S.), headed by
Robert Bigelow who is solely responsible for looking at our scientific data and
finding it worthy of inclusion in their studies. The board of directors of N.I.D.S.
is composed of some of the finest scientific authorities in the United States. Our
findings to date have been as follows:
Of the eight surgeries performed, we have four that were metallic rods
covered with an unusual biological membrane not found in the medical
literature. This membrane tightly wraps the metallic rods and is dark gray and
shiny. Mysteriously, it cannot be cut through with a surgical blade. The analysis
of this tissue shows that it is composed of three substances most probably
belonging to the recipient of the implant. These substances are a protein
coagulum, hemosiderin, and keratin.
In addition, we have found two other biological mysteries. The soft tissue
surrounding the objects demonstrates microscopically that the area has a high
quantity of small nerve receptors called proprioceptors. Secondly, there is a
stark and surprising absence of any inflammatory response to these objects,
although we all know it is virtually impossible to have something enter the
body without it responding by inflammation. We believe that the reason for this
has to do with the formation of the membrane. The metallurgical findings are
also earth-shaking.
Scientists who have examined the “implants” compare them to meteorite
fragments because they contain isotopic ratios consistent with nonearthly
isotopic ratio numbers.
Three of the objects appeared to be small grayish-white ovoid balls. These
were in turn attached to an abnormality of the skin, which is commonly
associated with the abduction phenomenon called a “scoop mark”. When the
surgical procedures were performed, the entire segment was removed and sent
in for pathological analysis. The ovoid balls are still being examined, but
preliminary results on one of the objects. shows that it is composed of eleven
complex elements.
Photograph of an alleged alien implant

Some of the biological findings associated with these skin abnormalities
include such things as Solar Elastosis, a rare exposure of the dermal layer of the
skin to ultraviolet radiation. Last but not least is the object removed from the
heel area, which appeared to be glass or crystal. After careful and continued
analysis, we found that the object was brown bottle glass made by Dow
Corning.
However, the other objects seem to be structured as if designed for a
purpose. This purpose has not been determined yet. We hope that further study
will provide answers regarding function. One possibility is that the objects are
tracking devices. This would enable someone or something to find individuals
anywhere on the globe. Another possibility is that they are behavior-controlling
devices. I believe a more plausible purpose might be a device for monitoring
certain pollution levels or even genetic changes in the body. This may be
similar to the way we monitor our astronauts in space. Only more time, effort,
and study will answer these questions.
Many believe that we are on the verge of a great scientific discovery: that
mankind is actually being tampered with by extraterrestrial intelligences. Also,
based on the work of Zecharia Sitchen, Allen Alford and others, I personally
believe that alien intervention in the development of mankind has been going
on for thousands of years and that man’s consciousness has undergone a
systematic process of expansion and greater awareness. This in turn gives rise
to our conscious awareness of the abduction phenomenon.
—ROGER K. LEIR
Incident at Exeter (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966). Saturday Review writer John
G. Fuller wrote a column for that magazine and an article for Look magazine
about a wave of UFO sightings in New Hampshire. He expanded those articles
into this book, which is the first to draw a connection between UFOs and
powerlines, over which the bright balls of red lights were seen hovering, and
which may have caused a blackout affecting the Northeastern United States.
insectoids “Big Bugs” thought to be of alien origin. Generally the form

resembles a praying mantis that is larger than a man, but variants include
grasshopper, fly, ant, and caterpillar. Their history is quite unusual and bears
special interest to those with an interest in the cultural dimension of alien
imagery.
Throughout most of history, believers in other worlds have buttressed their
position with theology. The feeling was other worlds must be populated. God
would not waste worlds by having them barren of life and people. God
designed the world for men. Other worlds meant other men. The first important
challenge to this reasoning appeared in 1742 when David Hume, famous for his
criticism of the Argument from Design which supported belief in the existence
of God, warned that life on other worlds would not be copies of ourselves. In a
fictional dialogue, a character of his named Philo points out that nature is
diverse for such expectations.
Pierre Louis Moreau in his Essaie de Cosmologie (1750) soon after
affirmed, “If such great varieties are observed already among those who
populated the different climes of the earth, how can one conceive of those who
live on planets so distant from our own? Their varieties probably exceed the
scope of our imagination.” The atheistic Baron d’Holbach in La systeme de la
nature (1770) similarly argued that the different temperatures of other worlds
meant their inhabitants may not be like us.
This sensibility did not immediately overturn more stolidly anthropomorphic
views. Pride of place on the eve of the Darwinian revolution goes to Thomas
Cullin Simon’s Scientific Certainties of Planetary Life (1855) which asserted
all planets would share the same vegetable, animal, and intellectual life.
Charles Darwin’s demolition of the Design argument with his theory of
evolution by natural selection gave the speculation of non-human life elsewhere
added force. In 1870, Richard A. Proctor indicated stellar nebulae might be
inhabited by “their own peculiar forms of life.” In his 1873 work, The
Borderland of Science, he affirms that if life exists on Mars, “it must differ so
remarkably from what is known on earth because of its atmosphere.” R. S. Ball
in Story of the Heavens (1885) indicated life elsewhere should be specially
adapted to their particular environments: “Life in forms strange and
weird...stranger than ever Dante described or Doré drew.”
Camille Flammarion was especially influential with the 1885 edition of The
Plurality of Inhabited Worlds (1885) when he routed prior thinkers on the
question for their anthropomorphism. The “planetarians” imagined by
Huygens, Wolff, Swedenborg, Kant, Locke, and Fourier were only remodeled
men. Soon after, the idea of silicon-based lifeforms turns up in Astronomie with
a Dr. Julius Scheiner urging that extraterrestrials may not resemble us.
Imagination was clearly being set free by the new world-view of the
Darwinians.
It was a cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, who first introduced the idea of
alien insects into scientific discourse. While on a dreamy vacation in 1896, he
was pondering the question of Earth-Mars communication using dot-dash-line
signals. A fantasy came to him of a mad millionaire on Mars signaling us. A
clever girl deduces a base-8 code because “the Mars folk are nothing more than
highly-developed ants, who counted up to 8 by their 6 limbs and two antennae
as our forefathers counted up to 10 on their fingers.” A couple years later,
Edward Mason offers a paper proposing life on the planets of other systems
might be similar to ants and dragonflies. (Crowe, 1999)
Perhaps the first work of fiction to put Big Bugs on distant planets was John
Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894). It involves a trip to Jupiter
that is still in the carboniferous stage of evolution. Among the creatures they
find are dinosaurs, mastodons, giant serpents and flesh-eating ants the size of
locomotives. Paleontological finds of giant dragonflies and other fossil
discoveries indicative of giant life earlier in Earth’s history combined with the
growing popularity of evolutionary thought
Fred T. Jane’s To Venus in Five Seconds (1897) takes up Francis Galton’s
communicative ants and populates Venus with big, brainy bugs. Soon after, the
Darwinian, H.G. Wells famously imagined a society of insectile Selenites in
First Men in the Moon (1901). Diverse writers in the pulp era, including leaders
like E.E. “Doc” Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, kept the idea
going during the pulp era among the flood of the Big bug stories up to the start
of sci-fi’s Golden Age around 1940. John W. Campbell exiled them from
science fiction because of their scientific implausibility.
They soon returned in the fifties, as filmmakers grew comfortable with sci-fi
themes and trick photography. Killers from Space (1954) had aliens hoping to
destroy humanity with Big Bugs and other giant vermin. The success of the
giant-ant film Them! (1954) quickly turned Big Bugs into an easy horror cliché.
There has been a relatively constant stream of insectoid-related films, TV
shows, comic books, and cultural media ever since. Much of it is considered
campy by culture vultures and even specialists in horror and science fiction
rarely discuss it.
Fictional insectoids in 1937
While the current philosophy that Nature does indeed waste worlds—an idea
now amply reinforced by space probes proving the existence of dead worlds—
is partly responsible for alien insects being a feature of modern Western
imagination, non-rational aspects also must partly underlie their use. The
creatures are a way of exploiting people’s fears about bugs, evoking the
emotions of horror. Obvious enough, it seems, yet this leads us into a deep
paradox.
Fear of insects is one of the more common phobias in human psychology,
though the argument continues about whether this fear is learned or innate. The
nervous system seems to have a bias in developing fears about spiders;
arachnophobia is easier to acquire and harder to extinguish than other animal
phobias. It may be in part be learned in youth when one sees the fear in the
mother or others; but traits like blackness, similarity to pubic hair, or sheer
strangeness may act on a more innate level to imprint fear. Whatever the
ultimate explanation, the fear exists viscerally in many humans and we may
reasonably expect storytellers to have exploited it for its cringing value
throughout history. Exaggerating the size of bugs should be a common
gimmick much as giants and large beasts are a common feature of world
mythology.
It should, but in fact the image appears only in modern Western civilization.
One can spend days looking through texts on mythology and world artwork and
find only a tiny few ambiguous and isolated specimens analogous to current
Big Bug fantasies. One hopeful precursor would be the giant spider drawing
among the Nazca lines etched into the landscape of Peru. Though the image is
big, what is not known is if the culture actually envisioned the spider as large in
its myths. Spiders appear on Nazca ceramics, and one seems to represent a
demon transformed into a large insect that captures a bird. Tarantulas however
actually have shown the ability to kill birds. The Nazca lines also have giant
drawings of a spider monkey and bird with no indication of them being thought
mythically gigantic.
A compilation of superstitions about animals can be found in Hastings’
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics where it is blatantly obvious that insect
lore is a small genre compared to that of bears, goats, dogs, cats, and even
cuckoo birds. We are told the Bushmen worshipped a mantis named Cagn or
Ikaggen. Caucasians termed the mantis the “Hottentot god.” The Hottentots
also feared the scarab beetle, and the author notes the existence of a cult of the
scarab among Egyptians. But if there is any relevance to modern big bug
fantasies, it has to be faint. May Berenbaum’s discussion of insect art and myth
is especially recommended as illustrative of the fact that bugs had various
symbolic properties through the ages, but gigantism never featured in their
portrayal until recent times.
Should the scorpion men of the Epic of Gilgamesh be called Big Bugs or
monstrous men? An 1149 painting of Satan, the Vision of Tundal, makes him
look almost like a giant centipede, yet the intent was to portray him as a man
with a thousand hands and fingernails like knights’ lances. A giant Earth spider
drawn by Hokusai in Japan around 1814 comes as close as anything to being a
true Big Bug yet I found nothing about the myth it illustrates. An 1846 story by
Edgar Allan Poe seems possibly relevant, yet it involves an illusion that makes
a small bug seem large, not a fantasy about a truly monster-sized bug. Even if
one was in a generous mood to consider these things as somehow relevant, the
frequency of this imagery before 1890 is orders of magnitude below the rate
since then.
Cross-cultural studies do not exist to confirm or deny if arachnophobia is a
specifically modern phenomenon, but animal phobias demonstrably are
panhuman and this is probably grounds enough to suspect bug fears pre-date
the modern era. In the 19th century, substantial strides were made in sanitation
that might have enhanced anxieties over the germ-carrying activities of bugs,
yet pre-moderns surely associated bugs with sickness and death. It would be
nice if one could blame Big Bugs imagery on the invention of the microscope,
but that happened three centuries too soon.
Some Big Bug stories pre-date their use as alien insects. They involve
tropical origins and origins in biological experiments, areas made familiar by
the Darwinian revolution. Even after they start populating fictional other
worlds, these themes of bugs grown large in mad experiments and primitive
tropical regions —lost jungles, evolutionarily isolated caverns, the inner Earth
—recur repeatedly.
The main deduction following these observations is that Big Bug imagery
did not arise out of pure archetypal psychological processes, but arose as a
tradition contingent upon historical events. When storytellers create new
examples they cannot be re inventing the idea wholly by accessing an
unconscious realm of universal fears. They are building upon prior work.
The idea of UFOs being populated by bugs is one of the earliest speculations
of the UFO literature, but evidence for it was indirect and arguably nonexistent.
For the first couple of decades of the flying saucer era, no accounts exist of
anyone seeing bugs inside an alien craft. There are a couple of ambiguous
creatures—a humanoid with compound eyes like a bug and a dream reported to
Carl Jung—but the first fully realized space bug appears in the mid-1960s.
The first claimant was Ted Owens and his story of the alien grasshoppers
Twitter and Tweeter emerged under circumstances that would today be called
channeling. That would be enough to render it dubious to serious UFOlogists
and we should add they did not embrace it. The saucer press gave him some
public exposure and he managed to get an autobiographical account of his
contact published by Gray Barker’s Saucerian Press. (Owens, 1969) The
doubtful character of the Owens contact is enhanced by the presence of
elements that look inspired by the movie First Men in the Moon (1964), a
gorgeous extravaganza made possible by Ray Harryhausen’s effects artistry.
Aliens with grasshopper traits appear in abductions with better pedigrees
sporadically thereafter. (Kottmeyer, 1996)
The first insectoid said explicitly to resemble a large praying mantis appears
in a hypnotic regression dated March 14, 1986, in which horror writer Whitley
Strieber explores a 1967 incident at this grandmother’s house. A praying mantis
appears in the middle of the living room, scaring the beejeesus out of his son.
“How can it be so big?” he asks. A few months after Communion was
published, John Lear issued a statement revealing the “horrible truth” that a
saucer crash many years ago proved that UFOnauts were ugly little creatures,
shaped like praying mantises and who were more advanced than us by perhaps
a billion years. Like a Lovecraft creation, those who learned this firsthand have
tended to commit suicide, one of those being Defense Secretary James V.
Forrestal whose records are still sealed. Lear’s statement was one of the more
widely disseminated pieces of EBE-lore and probably was a major influence in
people coming forward with their insectoid encounters in the past decade.
Cases now number in the dozens, a small yet impressive fraction of abduction
entities reported. The nature of these entities is a matter of interesting debate
with some thinking them almost godlike in their oversight of humanity. Others
think they are servants to more imperial minded reptoids. (Kottmeyer, 1999)
That UFOlogists have dared to allow such campy material to be presented as
evidence for the reality of aliens is a strange testament to open-mindedness.
Insectoid accounts will be rejected outright by people with an exposure to
science-writing. Bugs are small in real life for certain reasons. As they become
larger, hair-like limbs cannot support the weight of the body. The physical
material has to be thicker and stronger and placed more directly under the torso.
Bugs oxygenate their tissues via diffusion of air through small holes in the
exoskeleton. Beyond a couple of inches, oxygenation of the deeper tissues
becomes impossible. Bigger bugs need lungs. A more extensive musculature is
needed with increasing mass, and with it an interior skeleton. The proboscis of
some bugs is an adaptation to deal with the surface tension of water and would
be useless for man-sized bugs, yet it has been reported in at least one encounter
case.
Some will doubtless argue that insectoids must be real and that earlier
cultural material reflects evidence of veiled encounters now known only
because UFOlogists use hypnosis to unlock the secret of their presence on
Earth. The obvious problem is the arrival time. Most UFOlogists assume either
the aliens arrived in 1947 to check on atomic activity or have been with us
throughout history. If one picks 1947, why is there is so much Big Bug imagery
in science fiction before then? If one chooses to believe they have always been
with us, why is there virtually no Big Bug imagery before 1890? Did insectoids
have a special fear about the development of Darwinian philosophy that they
chose then to furtively invade us?
By failing to reject such reports, UFOlogists grant themselves the same
dramatic license as creators of horror films and tacitly flaunt abductions as a
tool to evoke fear, revulsion, and confusion. The claim that abduction
experiences are immune to psychological insight is only acceptable in the same
way one might casually lament why so many people go to horror films or how
anybody could produce such monstrosities.
The presence of insectoids proves with high probability the fictional
character of a significant subset of abduction reports. The imagery of the UFO
phenomenon is distinctly reflective of modern Western culture in this matter. To
accept their material reality is to play blind to a substantial cultural genealogy
and their birth on Earth in modern times.
References:
Berenbaum, May R. Bugs in the System: Insects and Their Impact on Human Affairs (Helix, 1995).
Bleiler, Everett. Science Fiction—The Early Years (Kent State, 1990).
Crowe, Michael. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 1750-1900 (Dover, 1999).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Space Bug a Boo Boo,” Talking Pictures #15 (Summer, 1996).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Graying Mantis,” The REALL News (May, 1999).
Owens, Ted. How to Contact Space People (Saucerian, 1969).
Sullivan, Jack, ed. Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (Viking, 1986).
Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden-Day, 1966) by I.S. Shklovskii and

Carl Sagan. A Russian and an American astronomer team up in this book to
voice their suspicion that an advanced civilization may have visited or briefly
colonized our solar system in ancient times. Shklovskii theorizes that Phobos
and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, might be artificial satellites, which are
“mute testaments to an ancient Martian civilization.” Sagan calculates, based
on Frank Drake’s estimate of technical civilizations existing in our galaxy, that
each “should be visited by another such civilization about once every thousand
years.”
Interrupted Journey, The (The Dial Press, 1966). Saturday Review magazine
columnist John G. Fuller relates the story of a New Hampshire couple who
underwent regressive hypnosis to uncover memories of their apparent
abduction by aliens. This case involving Betty and Barney Hill became the first
alien abduction story to receive widespread publicity, resulting in a 1975 made-
for-television movie called The UFO Incident, starring James Earl Jones. Their
experience became the standard by which all later abduction accounts would be
compared.
interstellar travel A major argument against any UFOs being intelligently

controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft is that travel between star systems is
impossible. Other stars are too far away from us; it would take too long to get
here; it would take too much energy; it always takes less energy to
communicate than to travel, etc. These arguments are almost never made by
aeronautical or astronautical engineers, but rather by astronomers and often by
SETI specialists trying to justify the use of radiotelescopes to listen for radio
signals from alien civilizations.
Some assume that visitors would have to come from another galaxy. Our
own Milky Way galaxy is about 80,000 light years across, perhaps 15,000 light
years thick, and contains upwards of 100 billion stars. Why worry about
another galaxy? There are none closer than about 1 million light years, yet
within 55 light years of our solar system there are about 1000 stars of which 46
are very similar to the sun and might well have planets and life. That is to say
they are not too hot or too cold; too new or too old; don’t have a companion
star which would make planetary orbits too variable; don’t vary in their energy
output very much over time, so life would have a chance to develop in fairly
stable conditions. There are even some planets orbiting nearby sun like stars—
more than a billion years older than our sun—within possibly habitable zones.
Civilizations on planets around such stars might have begun their technological
development a billion years before ours.
Most arguments against interstellar travel neglect the simple fact that
technological progress almost always comes from doing things differently in an
unpredictable way. Lasers aren’t just better light bulbs. Micro-integrated
circuits are not just better transistors; nuclear fission rockets—many of which
were successfully operated in the 1960s, at power levels as high as 4.4 billion
watts—are not just better chemical rockets. In each case different physics are
involved in the more advanced system.
Therefore, one might expect better means of long distance communication
than radio (which might not be observed with radio telescopes) and certainly
more advanced means of propulsion than the use of modern chemical rockets.
Detailed studies done almost 40 years ago in industry show that trips to nearby
stars are feasible with round trip times shorter than the average human life
span, using staged nuclear fusion rockets. Fusion reactions provide the energy
of the stars and of hydrogen bombs. Many different fusion reactions are
available. The most interesting appears to be the use of the Deuterium (heavy
hydrogen with one neutron and one proton) Helium-3 (light helium with two
protons and one neutron) reaction. This produces charged particles which
(unlike neutrons produced in other fusion reactions) can be directed out the
back end of the rocket with electric and magnetic fields and which have 10
million times as much energy per particle as can be obtained in a chemical
rocket.
Many other schemes have been proposed including space-time warping,
white holes, the energy of the vacuum, laser propulsion, etc. Of course
advantage would be taken of the fact that time slows down for things moving at
close to the speed of light. For example, at 99.99 percent of the speed of light it
only takes 6 months pilot time to travel a distance of 37 light years.
Considering that man’s first powered flight took place less than a century ago,
it would not be surprising if visitors had technology about which we know
nothing.
Into The Fringe: A True Story of Alien Abduction (Berkley Books,

1992). Texas English professor Karla Turner describes in this book how she
and relatives and friends experienced a contagion of alien abductions and body
wounds. Over a 13-month period, at least ten people in Karla’s life reportedly
experienced the same disturbing pattern of alien intrusions and disturbances.
Intruders (Random House, 1987). According to Budd Hopkins, humans are the
subject of an alien breeding experiment which tracks specific family
bloodlines. This book chronicles the UFO-related experiences of “Kathie
Davis” (real name Debra Jordan-Kauble), who has since gained considerable
notoriety as an abductee thanks to Hopkins. This book along with Whitley
Strieber’s Communion heralded, or helped initiate, a major wave of abduction
stories continuing through the remainder of the 20th century.
th
Invaders from Mars (National Pictures/20 Century-Fox, 1953). A classic
science fiction film of the Cold War era, starring Helena Carter, Arthur Franz,
Jimmy Hunt, and Leif Erickson.
This was one of the first films to portray humans under medical assault by
aliens and to show the insertion of implants. It could also have influenced the
famous Barney and Betty Hill case.
The story involves the takeover of a small town by aliens from a landed
flying saucer. The events are seen through the eyes of a boy whose parents are
also victimized by the aliens and put under a form of mind control—
accomplished through the use of small devices implanted surgically into the
victims’ bodies.
Clute and Nicholls comment (in their Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) that
the film produces: “...a powerful metaphor for the loneliness and alienation of a
child whose world seems subtly wrong. The image of human bodies concealing
incomprehensible and menacing alien motives was, in its paranoia, an
important one in US sci-fi cinema, especially during the 1950s Communist-spy
phobias.”
& RONALD D. STORY
References
Clute, John, and Nicholls, Peter. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993; 1995).
Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies, Vol. 1 (McFarland, 1982).
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Republic Pictures, 1956; directed by Don

Siegel.) A classic alien invasion film of the Cold War era, starring Kevin
McCarthy, Dana Wynter, and Carolyn Jones; based on a story by Jack Finney.
The film portrays the aliens as interstellar parasites who create replicas of
human individuals, thus assuming their identities and taking over their minds as
well as their bodies. The aliens themselves are spawned as giant seed pods that
float through space until encountering a host planet. Each pod serves as a
“blank” to be filled in by the human form. The conversion process takes place
while the victim sleeps—a parallel feature of modern UFO-abduction lore.
Upon awakening, the new “pod person” is without human feeling or
individuality. He or she becomes an emotionless “clone” only appearing like a
human being on the surface.
The film exploits the venerable mythic theme of the doppelganger—more
commonly termed the “evil twin”—in the service of exploring the horror of
dehumanization. Pods come down from space and replace people with
duplicates that take the body and memories, but are subtly different. The “pod
people” are vegetable in their essence and cannot take in the animal vitality of
humanity: their emotions, desires, and love. As they quickly spread and
threaten to overtake all the friends and neighbors of the central character, there
is a confrontation in which the pod people make their case that life is so much
simpler as a vegetable. Love does not last and there is no pain.
In interviews, Siegel explains his attraction to the story as due to his
knowing people who gave into the seduction of settling for contentment and
turning off their passions, unaware that the trade-off is a living death. The
allegory of the pod people is thus a timeless morality story sure to be retold
over the years, as partly illustrated by the 1978 remake by Philip Kaufman.
& RONALD D. STORY
References
Finney, Jack. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Dell Books, 1954, 1955, 1978).
Clute, John, and Nicholls, Peter. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (St. Martin’s/Griffin, 1993; 1995).
Siegel on “Invasion of the Body Snatcher,s” Cinefantastique (Winter, 1973).
Invisible College, The (E.P. Dutton, 1975). Jacques Vallée proposes that a
control system for human consciousness connected to the UFO phenomenon is
being explored in secret by a group of scientists. This control system, which the
author believes has influenced humankind since the dawn of history, originates
either within the collective human consciousness or as a direct consequence of
extraterrestrial intervention.
Invisible Residents (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970). Ivan T. Sanderson tries to

draw connections between UFO sightings and the disappearance of ships and
planes. He claims to have plotted these sightings and disappearances on maps
and found ten vortices around the planet which are used by UFOs to distort
space and time and cause ships, planes, and people to disappear without a trace.
Is Another World Watching? (Carroll & Nicholson/Harper and Brothers,

1950; Bantam Books, 1951). Subtitled: The Riddle of the Flying Saucers, this
was the first book on the topic of flying saucers to be published in the U.K. and
the second (following Key-hoe’s The Flying Saucers are Real) in the U.S.
Variety columnist Gerald Heard tries to make a case that 2-inch long bees
from Mars are buzzing Earth in saucers to show their displeasure about our
atomic weapons. He urges Earth scientists to establish diplomatic relations with
our own planet’s bees and to use them as intermediaries when and if the more
advanced Martian bees decide to “swarm upon us.”
Is Anyone Out There? (Delacorte Press, 1992). Astronomer Frank Drake and
science writer Dava Sobel believe humankind will receive radio signals but
never actual physical visits from other intelligent life in the universe. Perhaps
the most unexpected benefit of deciphering these signals, “bequeathing to us
vast libraries of useful information,” will be the secret of immortality,
delivering unto us “the grand instruction book telling creatures how to live
forever.” (Does this not sound a little like the legend of the Holy Grail?)
J
J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies Known as CUFOS, the J. Allen
Hynek Center for UFO Studies was founded in 1973 by Dr. J. Allen Hynek,
former chief scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book.
CUFOS is not a membership organization, but instead is composed of
volunteers, including scientists, academics, investigators, and members of the
public, all dedicated to the continuing serious examination and analysis of the
UFO phenomenon. It is supported entirely through public donations and
contributions.
The organization has several goals. The first is to be an archive for UFO
reports and literature. CUFOS maintains the largest collection of case files in
the world, including the files of NICAP, Blue Book, and its own report files.
CUFOS also investigates the most scientifically-promising cases it receives.
Second, it promotes the general public understanding of the UFO phenomenon
through its publishing program. This includes the quarterly International UFO
Reporter, special monographs and other documents, and the Journal of UFO
Studies, the only peer-reviewed journal devoted solely to the study of UFOs.
Third, CUFOS conducts various research projects and assists the research of
others. For example, CUFOS researchers have been involved in investigating
the Roswell incident, the psychological characteristics of abductees, physical
traces left by UFOs, and the history of government involvement in UFO
investigation.
2457 W. Peterson Ave. Chicago, IL 60659
Address:
U.S.A.
E-mail: infocenter@cufos.org
Jacobs, David M. (b. 1942). David M. Jacobs is Associate Professor of

History at Temple University, specializing in twentieth century American
history and culture. Dr. Jacobs began researching the controversy over
unidentified flying objects in America in the mid-1960s, and has amassed over
35 years of primary research data and analytical hypotheses on the subject.
David Jacobs
In 1973 Jacobs completed his doctoral dissertation in the field of intellectual

history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the controversy over
unidentified flying objects in America. This was only the second Ph.D. degree
granted involving a UFO-related theme. A revised version of his dissertation
was published by Indiana University Press as The UFO Controversy in America
(1975).
Since 1973 Dr. Jacobs has continued to devote most of his professional and
personal energies to researching the UFO phenomenon in general, and the
abduction phenomenon in particular. Having conducted over 750 hypnotic
regressions with over 125 abductees, Dr. Jacobs is one of the foremost UFO
abduction researchers in the world.
The results of his studies are reported in two books: Secret Life (1992) and
The Threat (1998). Jacobs is also the founder and director of a research
organization known as ICAR: The International Center for Abduction
Research.
Department of History
Temple University
Address: Philadelphia, PA 19122
U.S.A.
E-mail: djacobs@temple.edu
Web site: www.ufoabduction.com
POSITION STATEMENT: Having studied the UFO and abduction phenomenon

since the mid-1960s, I have gone through different phases of enthusiasm for it.
At first I was thrilled with the idea that it might mean extraterrestrial contact.
Eventually I was challenged by the difficulty of proving not only that contention
but also of demonstrating the subject’s importance to the scientific community.
By the early 1970s, the difficulty of understanding the origins and motivations of
the UFOs provided me with almost insurmountable intellectual demands.
My interest in the abduction phenomenon came in 1982 with my
introduction to Budd Hopkins and his work. In 1986 I began my own hypnosis
of abductees. After investigating hundreds of abduction events, I have come to
understand, at least partially, the nature of this phenomenon. What I have found
has been unsettling. As a result of my own studies and of the research of other
abduction researchers, I have begun to grasp alien motivations, purposes, and
goals. The consequences have been that I have come to fear this clandestine
program of physiological exploitation by one species of another for an alien
agenda. I dislike what the phenomenon does to the lives of individual
abductees, and I like even less the changes that the abductors intend for the
society in which the abductees live.
I fully understand the fringe position that I occupy within UFO research
community, but I have, unfortunately, not found an alternative theory to
account for the data.
The intellectual challenges that faced me in the past have now changed
drastically. I confront the subject with dread. Studying its motivations results in
my anxiety. I find myself in the position of having spent my entire adult life
studying a phenomenon that I have come to abhor. I desperately wish I could
say otherwise.
—DAVID M. JACOBS
JAL Flight #1628 Alaska sighting November 17, 1986: Japanese Airlines pilot
Kenju Terauchi was on a routine cargo flight from Iceland to Anchorage,
Alaska, when he and his two crewmen saw the lights of three mysterious
“craft” following his jet. One of the walnut-shaped objects appeared
enourmous, dwarfing his Boeing 747, while the other two were smaller.
The objects, each of which appeared to have two panels of lights, darted
quickly and occasionally stopped suddenly—once appearing in front of the
cockpit. They instantly disappeared and reappeared, according to the 47-year-
old pilot.
Terauchi said he briefly glimpsed the largest object in silhouette eight miles
away. “It was a very big one—two times bigger than an aircraft carrier,” he
said. He tried to shake the objects with evasive maneuvers, but said they
followed his plane for 400 miles.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Air Force said a large
object appeared on air traffic controllers’ radar screens. FAA flight control
reports indicated that the object stayed with Flight 1628 for at least 32 minutes.
The flight controller directing the Japanese plane reported the object on his
radar as close as five miles to the jet.
When the recorded radar transmission was replayed later, however, there
was no image except for the JAL cargo plane. Anchorage FAA spokesman Paul
Steuche said it was possible the signal from the UFO was strong enough to be
picked up at the time, but not strong enough to register on the radar recording
system.
Subsequent FAA examination of the tapes showed what appeared to be a
second object near JAL Flight 1628, but investigators now think it may have
been a double image from the 747. FAA investigators who questioned the crew
in Anchorage concluded they were “normal, professional, rational and had no
drug or alcohol involvement.”
Captain Terauchi reported sighting unusual lights again on the morning of
January 11, 1987, while on a flight from London to a refueling stop in
Anchorage. “After landing at Anchorage I checked the map,” he said, “and
concluded it was a light of a town or village” reflected off ice crystals. The first
one “was a real UFO,” Terauchi added, noting that crew members (copilot
Takanori Tamefuji and flight engineer Yoshio Tsukuba) also saw it.
—CORAL E. LORENZEN
References:
APRO Bulletin, The. “Giant UFO Shadows 747” (April, 1987).
Maccabee, Bruce. “The Fantastic Flight of JAL 1628,” International UFO Reporter (March-April, 1987).
Jessup, Morris K. (1900-1959). An American astronomer who championed

the unorthodox, Jessup was the author of several pioneering books on the UFO
phenomenon, the first of which (The Case for the UFO, 1955) became famous
in connection with the Allende Letters episode. At the age of fifty-nine (on
April 20, 1959), he committed suicide in Dade County, Florida, under
circumstances thought by some UFO specialists to be “suspicious.”
Jessup was born on a farm near Rockville, Indiana, on March 2, 1900. He
grew up with an intense interest in astronomy, which he pursued at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where, after receiving a B.S. degree, he
served as assistant in astronomy (in 1925), instructor in astronomy (1925-26)
and member of the University of Michigan’s expedition to Mexico (in 1926).
Morris K. Jessup
While working as an observer at the Lamont-Hussey Observatory associated

with the university (1926-30), Jessup received a Master of Science degree (in
1926) and began a doctoral dissertation. University records show that he
stopped his Ph.D. work in the spring of 1931 without receiving the degree.
Reportedly, he worked later at Drake University but no records of his
employment can be found there.
Until he became interested in UFOs, in the mid-1950s, little is known of
Jessup’s life after leaving the University of Michigan. He was a photographer
on a U. S. Department of Argiculture expedition up the Amazon investigating
rubber cultivation, and he was reportedly in South Africa in charge of an
observatory mapping southern stars. Some tales place him in the Andes,
investigating Inca ruins, and in Mexico in the early 1950s, charting alien
structures.
He is the author of four books: The Case for the UFO (1955), UFO and the
Bible (1956), The UFO Annual (1956), and The Expanding Case for the UFO
(1957).
In April 1959 he committed suicide by placing a hose from the exhaust pipe
of his station wagon into the car, while parked in a public park. Some UFO
buffs suggest he was murdered to silence some secret knowledge connected
with the Bermuda Triangle or the “Philadelphia Experiment,” but evidently he
was a deeply troubled man who had been discussing suicide for several months.
—JAMES E. OBERG
POSITION STATEMENT: The subject of UFOs in its present stage is like

astronomy in that it is a purely observational “science,” not an experimental one;
necessarily, therefore, it must be based on observation and not on experiment.
Observation, in this case, consists of everything which can be found to have
bearing on the subject. There are thousands of references to it in ancient
literature, but the authors did not know that their references had any bearing, for
the subject did not then exist. The writers were recording such things as met
their senses solely through an honest effort to report inexplicable observational
data.
Some of my contemporaries have attempted to prove that all of these
phenomena are, in some way or other, illusory, and that in any case they do not
involve flight, wingless or otherwise, mechanical propulsion or intelligent
direction.
I consider their negative case unproven because there is an overwhelming
mass of authentic evidence which can be cited as: (1) direct observation, (2)
indirect observation, and (3) supporting evidence or indication.
There is one sphere of indirect evidence in the form of events of a
mysterious nature which have never been explained. These things would be
easy to explain were we to admit the limitations of our own knowledge, and the
possibility of “intelligence” elsewhere in the universe operating spaceships-and
quite possibly more than one kind of “intelligence” and more than one kind of
space-ship!
This world is full of unexplained oddities. The legends of Atlantis and Mu
have been favorite targets of the scoffers. They say there are no ghosts, no
spirits, nothing falls from the sky but iron and stone meteorites. But for
centuries the Earth was believed to be flat, there was no America, no
heliocentric system of Earth and planets, no fossil dinosaurs; yet we now know
these beliefs to have been wrong.
Reliable people have been seeing the phenomena known as flying saucers
for a thousand years and more. There are good reports as far back as 1500 B.C.
and before. Thousands of people have seen some kind of navigable
contraptions in the sky, and some have sworn it under oath.
I cannot agree with any astronomer who insists that all of these things are
mirages, planets, clouds, or illusions. The majority of the people are articulate
enough to tell their stories and sincere enough to make depositions before
notaries public. Even scientists concede that these folk saw something.
—MORRIS K. JESSUP
(Position statement was adapted from the Preface of Jessup’s book, The Case for
the UFO, 1955.)
Jesus as an extraterrestrial Although the concept of Jesus as an

extraterrestrial will be shocking and iconoclastic to some, such an interpretation
is inescapable.
Painting by Monarca Lynn Merrifield
The idea has received serious attention from Morris K. Jessup, Brinsley LePoer
Trench, W. Raymond Drake, Paul Thomas, Barry H. Downing, R.L. Dione,
Gerhard R. Steinhäuser, and others. Steinhäuser devoted an entire book to the
subject entitled Jesus Christ—Heir to the Astronauts (1974). More recently,
Raël, founder and leader of the 50,000-member Raëlian religion, claimed special
knowledge—direct from the Elohim—that this is true. (Raël, 1998). And in this
writer’s view, Jesus of Nazareth is indeed the extraterrestrial par excellence.
That Jesus was an extraterrestrial is first of all true by definition. Doesn’t
extraterrestrial mean “not of this Earth”? That Jesus came from another world,
performed miracles—which today would be associated with advanced
technology—and then returned to “heaven” is all part of the Holy Gospel.
Therefore, Jesus is de facto an extraterrestrial. Celestial wonders
accompanied his birth, many aspects of his life, his death, and resurrection are
not dissimilar to events associated today with UFO-related phenomena. In
addition to his own words (attributed to Jesus in the New Testament), the
evidence includes:
• His miraculous virgin birth, which some UFOlogists attribute to genetic

hybridization
• The star of Bethlehem, which hovered over his birthplace like a modern-
day flying saucer
• Voices from the sky affirming his otherworldly and superior nature
• His association with angels, who could also be considered de facto
extraterrestrials
• The transfiguration, during which he appeared as a being composed of
brilliant white light
• The resurrection, during which he walked through the walls of his tomb
• The ascension, in which he rose into the sky inside a “bright cloud”
• Sacred religious paintings (or icons) seemingly depicting Jesus in flight
Let us consider each item in more detail.
THE VIRGIN BIRTH
The circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus are full of hints that
something miraculous occurred. A “star” miraculously appears in the sky to
herald the birth of the God-Man.
Was the Star of Bethlehem a UFO? Illustration by Gustave Doré
Brinsley LePoer Trench, the late Earl of Clancarty, was one of the first to
suggest that Jesus was an alien hybrid: “Etheric Galactic reproduction proceeds
through juggling the chromosomes and genes already there to produce the
desired effect. Gabriel could have fathered Jesus only without actual
intercourse with Mary, because he was a Galactic.” (Trench, 1960)
Again we have a de facto case of something that is true by definition. If we
accept the tenets of Christianity, then we accept that Jesus was both the Son of
Man and the Son of God—not a mortal human, but a God-Man—a hybrid, in
other words. From the perspective of modern science, we can now postulate
that some form of genetic engineering may have taken place.
THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM
It is more than curious that a bright light or “star” hovered over the
birthplace of Jesus at just the right time and place.
Here are the relevant passages from Matthew 2:1-10:
Now when the birth of Jesus took place in Bethlehem of Judaea, in the
days of Herod the king, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,
Saying, Where is the King of the Jews whose birth has now taken place?
We have seen his star in the east and have come to give him worship.
And when it came to the ears of Herod the king, he was troubled, and all
Jerusalem with him.
And he got together all the chief priests and scribes of the people,
questioning them as to where the birthplace of the Christ would be.
And they said to him, In Bethlehem of Judaea; for so it is said in the
writings of the prophet,
You Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are not the least among the chiefs
of Judah: out of you will come a ruler, who will be the keeper of my people
Israel.
Then Herod sent for the wise men privately, and put questions to them
about what time the star had been seen.
And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, Go and make certain where the
young child is; and when you have seen him, let me have news of it, so that
I may come and give him worship.
And after hearing the king, they went on their way; and the star which
they saw in the east went before them, till it came to rest over the place
where the young child was.
And when they saw the star they were full of joy.
It is universally agreed—by astronomers and space-god proponents alike—

that the so-called “Star of Bethlehem” was not a star. As pointed out by R.L.
Dione, if “...it appeared only over Bethlehem...” it “...would have had to be
very close to the earth.” (Dione, 1974) Furthermore, the “star” was apparently
leading the Magi until it stopped over the birthplace of Jesus. Celestial objects
that are millions of miles or light years away do not behave in that manner.
It is also a fact that the “Star of Bethlehem” has never been definitively
identified by astronomers even with the assistance of powerful computers that
have calculated every instance of known objects such as comets, planets, and
supernovae. Some guesses have been made, but no one has ever truly
established just exactly what the Star of Bethlehem really was. Again, we have
a case in which it is true by definition that the Star of Bethlehem was an
unidentified flying object.
THE BAPTISM
Throughout the New Testament, Jesus is affirmed by voices from the sky
which some UFOlogists associate with some kind of loud-speaker system
emanating from hovering space craft.
A case in point occurs at the baptism of Jesus:
Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be given baptism
by him.
But John would have kept him back, saying, It is I who have need of
baptism from you, and do you come to me?
But Jesus made answer, saying to him, Let it be so now: because so it is
right for us to make righteousness complete. Then he gave him baptism.
And Jesus, having been given baptism, straight away went up from the
water; and, the heavens opening, he saw the Spirit of God coming down on
him as a dove;
And a voice came out of heaven, saying, This is my dearly loved Son,
with whom I am well pleased. (Matthew 3:13-17)
ANGELS AS ALIENS
Consider this passage from Luke 2:9: “And an angel of the Lord came to
them, and the glory of the Lord was shining round about them: and fear came
on them.”
This eleventh-century French cloisoosé angel is not entirely unlike some aliens that are reported
today. Even a possible “space helmet” seems to be in evidence.
The Bible is full of references to Jesus in the company of angels who are in
turn associated with bright lights. References to angels constitute the full range
of anomalies that we have come to associate with UFOs and their occupants.
As Jessup reminds us: “The theme of bright lights as connected with UFO
activity and the appearance of paranormal entities runs profusely through the
Bible and Apocryphal books. God, Angels, Messengers, Voices, appeared as,
in, or with brilliant lights.” (UFO and the Bible, p. 32)
In his book, The Sky People (1960), Trench quotes a statement of Jesus from
Mark 26-7:
And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with a
great power and glory.
And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his elect
from the four winds, from the uttermost parts of the earth to the uttermost
part of heaven.
Could the “bright cloud” have been a UFO and “Heaven” the planet from
which Jesus came?
THE TRANSFIGURATION
The transfiguration of Jesus—in which his appearance became glorified in a

display of radiant luminosity—took place probably on either Mt. Tabor or Mt.
Hermon.
According to the Bible:
And after six days Jesus takes with him Peter, and James, and John, his
brother, and makes them go up with him into a high mountain by
themselves.
And he was changed in form before them; and his face was shining like
the sun, and his clothing became white as light.
And Moses and Elijah came before their eyes, talking with him.
And Peter made answer and said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be
here: if you will let me, I will make here three tents, one for you, and one
for Moses, and one for Elijah.
While he was still talking, a bright cloud came over them: and a voice
out of the cloud, saying, This is my dearly loved Son, with whom I am well
pleased; give ear to him.
And at these words the disciples went down on their faces in great fear.
And Jesus came and put his hand on them and said, Get up and have no
fear.
And lifting up their eyes, they saw no one, but Jesus only.
(Matthew 17:1-8)
THE ASCENSION
Jessup thought that: “The ascension of Christ into the sky (Heaven) is the
best known example...” of Jesus as an advanced extraterrestrial, “...and is an
integral part of the resurrection story, or central miracle of Christianity.”
According to Jessup, “...some type of levitation was involved, and the least
disturbing solution lies in the presence of a UFO to lift Him, and take Him into
the clouds, or heavenly vault, which, to Him, was home.” (Jessup, 1956)
According to the Bible:
And he said to them, It is not for you to have knowledge of the time and
the order of events which the Father has kept in his control.
But you will have power, when the Holy Spirit has come on you; and
you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judaea and Samaria, and to
the ends of the earth.
And when he had said these things, while they were looking, he was
taken up, and went from their view into a cloud.
And while they were looking up to heaven with great attention, two men
came to them, in white clothing,
And said, O men of Galilee, why are you looking up into heaven? This
Jesus, who was taken from you into heaven, will come again, in the same
way as you saw him go into heaven.
(Acts 1:6-11)
“Cloud” seems to be a code word for UFO (or some form of aerial transport)
throughout the Bible. Jesus was also said to have walked through the solid
walls of his tomb, just as alien beings have been reported to do in modern
times.
ICONS
Also intriguing are the many sacred paintings called “icons,” on the walls of
churches and cathedrals throughout Eastern Europe, which could be taken to
represent Jesus in various aspects of spaceflight.
These paintings are said to represent the ascension, transfiguration, and
second coming, and show lines or rays being emitted from the tail end of the
surrounding design which give it a starlike or cometary appearance. It takes
only a little imagination to see how these frescoes could be interpreted as a man
in a spaceship.
THE MESSAGE
Downing points out that: “What is clear throughout the Biblical material...is
that God’s will for the Jews, and eventually for all mankind, was ‘revealed’ by
beings from another world.” (Downing, 1968)
Whether we think in metaphysical or technological terms, the Bible clearly
speaks of a superior, extraterrestrial intelligence coming down out of the sky to
first create, and then save, mankind. Therefore, if we accept the Bible literally,
it would be logically consistent to consider Jesus as a more highly evolved,
extraterrestrial being.
Whether he was just more advanced biologically and ethically—as if those
were small matters—or in a sacred spiritual sense (the Son of God, no less),
that is the great question. But either way, it would seem a safe bet to heed his
teachings.
In essence, I think Jesus was telling us how to save our souls (in more than
one sense) and how to achieve immortality (in more than one sense). Through
the use of parables, he imparted a great deal of practical wisdom that if put into
practice would benefit—and save—humanity. He also tried to teach us that man
is not the highest authority in the universe—or even on Earth—and that human
folly and hubris could lead to our downfall.
So far—he has been proven correct.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Drake, W. Raymond. Messengers from the Stars (London: Sphere Books, 1977). First published as Gods
or Spacemen? (Amherst Press, 1964).
Dione, R.L. God Drives a Flying Saucer (Corgi, 1974).
Downing, Barry. The Bible and Flying Saucers (London: Sphere Books, 1973).
Jessup, Morris K. UFO and the Bible (The Citadel Press, 1956).
Raël. The True Face of God (The Raëlian Foundation, 1998).
This collection of icons from churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and Asia traces the
Transfiguration (lower left), Ascension, and Second Coming of Christ.
Steinhäuser, Gerhard R. Jesus Christ—Heir to the Astronauts (Abelard-Schuman, 1974).

Thomas, Paul. Flying Saucers through the Ages (Tandem, 1973). First published as Les Extraterrestres
(France: Libraire Plon, 1962).
Trench, Brinsley LePoer. The Sky People (Neville Spearman, 1960).
Jesus Christ Heir to the Astronauts (Abelard-Schuman, 1974). German

author Gerhard Steinhäuser believes that between 12,000 and 8,000 b.c.
competing races of extraterrestrials waged a war throughout our solar system.
The winning race colonized Earth in Biblical times, inspired the myths of
Moses and Christ, and used energy gates such as the Gate of the Sun in Bolivia
as time transporters through which they left this planet.
Jordan-Kauble, Debra (b. 1959) Debbie Jordan-Kauble (formerly Debbie

Tomey) is also known as “Kathy Davis,” the central figure of Budd Hopkins’s
bestselling book, Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copely Woods (1987).
She later co-authored, with her sister Kathy Mitchell, Abducted! The Story of
the Intruders Continues (1994).
Debbie lives in north central Indiana with Dave Kauble (her husband of five
years), four dogs, two birds, and two cats. She is a licensed Cosmetologist and
mother of two grown sons. Debbie is a member of MENSA. She has traveled
all over the United States speaking about her experiences and recently traveled
to England to speak for BUFORA (British UFO Research Association). She has
appeared on Maury Povich, Dini Petty (Canada) Ophra Winfrey’s AM Chicago,
Sightings, and the Sci Fi Channel. She has appeared on numerous other radio
and television programs, as well. She assists her husband in maintaining an
impressive Web site of UFO research information, newsclips, and links.
P.O. Box 6730

Address: Kokomo, IN 46904
U.S.A.
E-mail: DebKauble@aol.com
Web site: www.debshome.com
FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNT OF CENTRAL UFO-ENCOUNTER
June 30, 1983: I was preparing to go to a neighbor’s house to do some sewing

and had stopped at the kitchen sink to wash my hands before I left the house. As
I looked aimlessly out the window, a very bright light radiating from the
swimming pool pumphouse caught my eye. At the time, I couldn’t figure out
exactly why this light didn’t seem quite right.
Debbie Jordan-Kauble (a.k.a. “Kathy Davis”)
A few minutes later, as I got in my car to leave, I decided to drive around the
back of the house on the turnaround to see if the light was still there. I couldn’t
shake the uneasy feeling I had when I had first seen it. When I reached a point
in the driveway where I could see the pump-house clearly, I saw that the light
was gone and the pedestrian door to the attached garage was now open. I began
to worry that there might be a prowler on the property. I don’t know why I
didn’t stop right then. Instead, I continued on my way to my neighbor’s house.
One of the “Intruders” (Drawing by Debbie Kauble)
When I arrived at my destination, I called my mother and reported to her

what I had seen. I asked her if she wanted me to come home. She told me that
she would be fine and not to worry about coming home. As soon as I hung up
the phone, it rang again. I answered it instinctively, and was surprised to hear
my mother’s voice on the other end asking me to come home “right away.” She
sounded frightened and that’s not like my mother.
When I returned home, I entered the house through the back patio door,
grabbed my father’s rifle, and proceeded to explore the back yard and the
attached garage. At one point in my investigation, I found my loyal dog, Penny,
hiding terrified beneath my father’s old ladder truck. I couldn’t drag her out
from under the truck no matter how hard I tried.
I then decided to have a look in the attached garage, to see how the door
could have been opened. While I was in there, looking behind old mattresses
and boxes, I suddenly began to feel as if my skin was on fire. I thought to
myself, “I’ve got to get out of here right now!” As I reached the open
pedestrian door, I was stopped in my tracks by a “bolt from the blue.” The only
way I can describe what I felt is to say I felt as if I had been hit in the chest by
lightning. I immediately thought to myself, “I’m dead! This is what it feels like
to be dead!” Every muscle in my body vibrated and I felt as if I were on fire
with this bright light tearing through my chest. I couldn’t see a thing because
the light was so bright, and even when my eyes were closed, the light was still
so bright that it hurt my eyes.
After what seemed like an eternity, the brightness of the light faded, the
vibrating stopped and I felt a heavy numbness sweep over me. I then realized
that I was paralyzed. My eyes were still having trouble focusing; all I could see
were a few vague shadows moving in front of me. I then felt a tug at my right
shoulder and felt a piercing pain in my right ear.
My next memory is of being about ten feet outside the doorway from where
all this had started. To my left, I could see the silhouette of an egg-shaped craft,
approximately twelve feet tall and ten feet wide at its greatest width. I could see
six small, bullet-shaped figures moving diagonally in front of me toward this
craft. I could see a soft white ball of light about ten feet in front of me. It was
about five feet off the ground, and it moved slowly down and then back up
again to where it had started. I recalled someone telling me that it was
unfortunate that I had to have felt pain, but that it was now over.
The next memory I had was of walking up the sidewalk to the kitchen door,
speaking to my mother, and then going back to my neighbor’s house to bring
her back to my house to swim. (I had decided to swim instead of sew.) I had no
memory of what had happened to me in the yard that night until a couple of
days later, when I first saw the mark the craft had left in our yard.
That mark was to remain there for nearly five years and after I saw it for the
first time, a dozen memories came flooding back to me of events that had
happened over much of my life.
POSITION STATEMENT: UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) exist. There are

many different explanations for them, some very rational and prosaic, others not
so clear. I don’t think there is any question as to their existence. Of the ones not
so easily explained away, we should be asking, “What are they, where are they
from, and why are they here?”
I have had so many different types of experiences with so many different
aspects of this field that I am somewhat mixed as to what I think they are and
where they come from. I have seen the hard evidence that debunkers claim does
not exist. I have also experienced the psychological and physical effects, as
well as the spiritual awakening of a close encounter. I am also smart enough to
realize how powerful the human mind can be when faced with something that it
cannot comprehend. All I have ever been able to do was report what I saw and
let everyone else sort it all out.
Deep in my heart, I cannot help but think that all paranormal phenomena is
somehow connected and that our visitors may be a part of our past as well as
our future. I don’t think the time traveler theory is out of the question. But
that’s just my opinion. I have tried to stay away from theories to avoid
contaminating the facts.
Over the past sixteen years, I have found many people who could tell me
what I didn’t see, or what didn’t happen, but no one has been able to tell me
what did happen. There is still a great deal that I don’t remember about some of
my experiences. I have resigned myself to the fact that I probably never will
know the “rest of the story.”
But one thing I am certain of—something extraordinary happened to me that
night back in 1983. Something that would change me and my life forever. Now,
if that isn’t something the whole world should know about, I don’t know what
is.
—DEBBIE JORDAN-KAUBLE
References
Hopkins, Budd. Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (Random House, 1987).
Jordan, Debbie, and Mitchell, Kathy. Abducted! The Story of the Intruders Continues… (Carroll & Graf,
1994).
Jung, Carl Gustav (1875-1961). C. G. Jung, world-famous psychiatrist (and

philosopher-psychologist), is perhaps best-known for some of the terms he
coined, such as “complex,” “introvert,” and “extrovert”; but he made his mark
in UFO research as well. His little book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of
Things Seen in the Skies (1958) has had a lasting influence on virtually every
UFOlogist who has ever considered the psychological and sociological aspects
of the UFO phenomenon.
C.G.Jung
Dr. Jung was born in Kesswil, Thurgau, Switzerland, on July 26, 1875, and
died at Kusnacht, Zilrich, on June 6, 1961. He earned his medical degree from
the University of Basle in 1900, and took a position shortly thereafter at the
University of Ziffich Psychiatric Clinic. His collaboration with Sigmund Freud
lasted from 1907 to 1914, at which time Jung established his own school of
thought, called Analytical Psychology (later renamed Complex Psychology).
The year 1921 saw the publication of Jung’s classic book, Psychological Types,
wherein the terms “introvert” and “extrovert” were first introduced.
According to Jungian theory, the human psyche is embroiled in a battle of
opposites: extroversion versus introversion; the ego (center of consciousness)
versus the integrated conscious and unconscious Self (or God-image); the
persona (or social mask) versus the shadow (unconscious natural self); thinking
and feeling (rational functions) versus sensation and intuition (irrational
forces). The dominant component is that which determines the individual’s
psychological type. The unifying elements are the archetypes or “primordial
images,” according to which we all think. The archetypes are manifested
symbolically in myths, dreams, and psychoses. Certain of these symbols are
common to every human psyche as part of what Jung called the “collective
unconscious.” He once said, “the archetypes of the unconscious can be shown
empirically to be the equivalents of religious dogmas.”
Some classic archetypes are the “wise old man,” the “great mother,” the
“trickster,” the “child-god,” “Christ” (or the ideal Self—with a capital “S”), and
the mandala (a Sanskrit word meaning “magic circle”), which Jung thought of
as representing UFOs (as well as the God-image).
The mandala is one of the oldest religious symbols found throughout the
world. Frieda Fordham wrote in her biography of Jung (An Introduction to
Jung’s Psychology, 1953): “Historically, the mandala served as a symbol
representing the nature of the deity, both in order to clarify it philosophically,
and for the purpose of adoration. Jung found the mandala symbolism occurring
spontaneously in the dreams and visions of many of his patients. Its appearance
was incomprehensible to them, but it was usually accompanied by a strong
feeling of harmony or of peace.” Jung himself later wrote (in Flying Saucers: A
Modern Myth):
“In so far as the mandala encompasses, protects, and defends the psychic
totality against outside influences and seeks to unite the inner opposites, it
is at the same time a distinct individuation symbol and was known as such
even to medieval alchemy. The soul was supposed to have the form of a
sphere, on the analogy of Plato’s world-soul, and we meet the same symbol
in modern dreams. By reason of its antiquity, this symbol leads us to the
heavenly spheres, to Plato’s “supra-celestial place,” where the “Ideas” of all
things are stored up. Hence there would be nothing against the naive
interpretation of the UFOs as “souls.” Naturally they do not represent our
modern conception of the soul, but rather an involuntary archetypal or
mythological conception of an unconscious content, a rotundum, as the
alchemists called it, that expresses the totality of the individual....
“If the round shining objects that appear in the sky be regarded as
visions, we can hardly avoid interpreting them as archetypal images. They
would then be involuntary, automatic projections based on instinct, and as
little as any other psychic manifestations or symptoms can they be
dismissed as meaningless and merely fortuitous. Anyone with the requisite
historical and psychological knowledge knows that circular symbols have
played an important role in every age; in our own sphere of culture, for
instance, they were not only soul symbols but “God-images.” There is an
old saying that ‘God is a circle whose center is everywhere and the
circumference nowhere.’ God in his omniscience, omnipotence, and
omnipresence is a totality symbol par excellence, something round,
complete, and perfect. Epiphanies of this sort are, in the tradition, often
associated with fire and light. On the antique level, therefore, the UFOs
could easily be conceived as “gods.” If these things [UFOs] are real—and
by all human standards it hardly seems possible to doubt this any longer—
then we are left with only two hypotheses: that of their weightlessness on
the one hand and of their psychic nature on the other.”
What occurred to Jung was that thoughts and dreams are also
“weightless,” and this he considered a clue to the psychic nature of UFOs,
which might mean that they are purely mental and have no existence
outside the mind of the observer. He regarded the UFO phenomenon as a
visionary rumor and as a psychological projection of man’s hopes and fears
in an uncertain world. Although not denying the possible physical reality of
the phenomenon, Jung saw UFOs as the new mythology—the Gods of the
age of science.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Fordham, Frieda. An Introduction to Jung’s Psychology (Penguin Books, 1953).
Paul/Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1959; Signet/NAL, 1969; Princeton University Press, 1978). (Original
German language edition published in 1958.)
_______. Mandala Symbolism (Princeton University Press, 1959, 1969).
K
Kecksberg (Pennsylvania) incident The Kecksberg event occurred on

December 9, 1965, about 40 miles from Pittsburgh in a rural area of western
Pennsylvania. At the time many people saw a brilliant object moving across the
sky. The news media focused on a young boy, who while playing outside, said
he saw an object fall from the sky into some nearby woods. The media pursued
his story since there were numerous accounts from others, that an aerial object
was seen over a large area including many reports from the greater Pittsburgh
area.
Besides the police authorities, various newspapers, and radio and TV
stations around Pittsburgh, had their phone lines jammed with calls about the
object in the sky. Coincidentally, author Frank Edwards, who had written some
popular books on UFOs, was a guest on a KDKA radio talk show in Pittsburgh
that evening, hosted by the late Mike Levine.
During my years of investigation into the matter, other witnesses who saw
the object go down into the woods that day have been located. It has been
stated that moments after the object fell, blue smoke rose up among the trees,
but dissipated quickly. Many people say that the military. including members of
the Army and Air Force, began to arrive in the area around the village of
Kecksburg within a few hours after the reported landing. During the evening,
reporters from numerous media sources went to Kecksburg to investigate the
event.
The area around the alleged impact site was cordoned off, and a search for
the object was conducted in the woods. Neither civilians nor reporters were
able to get near the spot where the object had reportedly fallen. Hundreds of
spectators looked on from a narrow county road which circled around the area,
unaware that the object appears to have fallen on the opposite side of the
woods.
As time passed that evening, many people left disappointed that they
couldn’t see the object. A few curious folks tried to sneak down into the woods,
and later told me that they were turned back by the military. Late that night,
others say they observed a military flatbed tractor-trailer truck, carrying a large
tarpaulin covered object, leaving the area at a high rate of speed. Reporters are
among the many witnesses who verify that they saw military personnel in the
Kecksburg area that night. The front page of the Greensburg, Pennsylvania,
Tribune-Review county edition dated December 10, 1965, ran the headlines
“Unidentified Flying Object Falls Near Kecksburg” and “Army Ropes Off
Area.” The city edition of the same paper however, on the same day ran the
headline “Searchers Fail To Find Object.”
Officially, no object was found in the woods by searchers. It was suggested
that the most likely explanation was that the brilliant object in the sky was a
meteor. But word that something was removed from the site by the military that
night, quickly circulated around the county. The Kecksburg incident remained a
topic for area radio talk shows for years as it does today. As the years passed, I
would receive various accounts from sources who claimed knowledge of the
event. Many of those involved with the incident even today, wish to remain
anonymous. Others have gone public and stand by their accounts. Some have
faced personal attacks and ridicule. Many important witnesses have passed
away.
What we now know is that there are individuals who say that they went
down into the woods that December day in 1965, before the military arrived,
and came across upon a large metallic acorn-shaped object partially buried in
the ground. The device was large enough for a man to stand inside of it. The
object was a bronze-gold color, and appeared to be one solid piece of metal,
displaying no rivets or seams. At the back of the acorn shape was what witness
Jim Romansky calls the bumper area.
Artist’s conception of the object some claim to have seen (Drawing by C.M. Hanna)
Upon this area were unusual markings that Romansky says looked similar to
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Romansky who has been a machinist for many
years, says the object itself, looked as though it had been made from liquid
metal and poured into a big mold. Since the object was impacted in the ground,
the bottom portion was not visible, but what could be seen appeared well intact.
The late John Murphy, was the new director of WHJB radio in Greensburg at
the time, and is believed to have been the first reporter on the scene. His former
wife says that she was in radio contact with him from the site that day, and that
he told her that he went down into the woods and saw the object. Various
informants have approached me with information. Some of these were people
who had military or government affiliation and wish not to be identified at this
time. Some information is expected to be revealed in the future, when these
sources feel that they are safe to disclose what they know.
I have also received anonymous tips that pointed me in the right direction
which helped to uncover other details. Before “Unsolved Mysteries” broadcast
their story about Kecksburg in 1990, I was contacted by a former Air Force
security policeman who told me that he was among the unit that guarded the
object when it arrived from Pennsylvania in the early morning hours of
December 10, 1965 at Lockbourne Air Force near Columbus, Ohio. He
remembers extreme security measures at the time, and says that the object was
only a the base for a short time, and then continued on to Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.
We later learned that the object was allegedly sealed up inside a building at
that base. After years of searching for government documents relating to this
event, the only official record located was in the Air Force Project Blue Book
files. Included in the report it was stated “A further call was made to the
Oakdale Radar site in Pennsylvania. A three-man team has been dispatched to
Acme [Some residents not far from the site have an Acme mailing address] to
investigate and pick up an object that started a fire.” While the report shows a
lot of interest from various agencies concerning the aerial object, the report also
indicates that the search found nothing. I have learned a lot about the
Kecksburg case over the years, yet there remain many unanswered questions. I
surely don’t have all of the answers.
Based on the accounts of multitudes of eyewitnesses which I have
interviewed, I am convinced that an object did fall from the sky and apparently
was removed by the military. Other witnesses say they saw NASA personnel at
the scene that night also involved in the search. Many have asked me what I
believe that the object was, and my reply still is “I don’t know.” As I have
stated in the past, the two most likely possibilities are (1) a highly advanced
man-made space probe with some reentry control capability (2) an
extraterrestrial spacecraft. It has been confirmed that a faulty Soviet Venus
probe identified as Kosmos 96, reentered in Canada on the same date, but at
about 3:18 A.M. The sightings around Kecksburg occurred at about 4:47 P.M.
many hours later. The Russian’s have told me that Kosmos 96 was not the
source of what fell that day.
Other researchers have provided me with interesting but unverifiable
information, that they have talked with former NASA sources who claimed to
have examined the object which fell in Pennsylvania, and determined it to be
Soviet in origin. I have also talked with two former military men who are
unknown to each other, that told me that during different years, and at different
installations, they saw the recovery report on the Kecksburg object, and both
said the report indicated that the object was extraterrestrial. From what the
observers tell us, the object whatever it was, appeared to be slowing down a
few miles before it impacted. During it’s flight, it appears to have made some
turns, and those who saw the object drop from the sky, say it was moving quite
slowly as it moved towards the woods. This might account for the good
condition of the object itself, and the little damage at the impact site, except for
trees which were reportedly knocked down.
One question we must ask is what was it that fell which was so important
that it caused the military to act the way they did at the scene?
Various witnesses have now gone public confirming that armed soldiers
were around the village, and were preventing anyone from trespassing near the
crash site. Jerry Betters, a popular jazz musician from Pittsburgh, has gone
public and told his story that soldiers aimed rifles at him and his friends,
ordering them from a back road, as an Army flat bed tractor-trailer with an
acorn-shaped object on board, was making it’s way up from a field.
More recently, a prominent businessman contacted me and told me how he
and his friends, then teenagers in 1965, tried to get near the site and were
stopped my military personnel. He was frightened at the time of the experience,
he thought the soldier was going to shoot him. Would armed soldiers respond to
the scene of a meteorite crash? Who issued the orders for such an operation to
take place? The Kecksburg mystery remains.
—STAN GORDON
References
Gordon, Stan. “Kecksburg: The Untold Story” video (Stan Gordon Productions, 1998).
Randle, Kevin D. A History of UFO Crashes (Avon Books, 1995).
Randles, Jenny UFO Retrievals (Blandford Books, 1995).
Young, Robert. “Old Solved Mysteries: The Kecksburg UFO Incident” in Frazier, Kendrick; Karr, Barry;
and Nickell, Joe, eds. The UFO Invasion (Prometheus Books, 1997).
Keel, John A. (b. 1930). Pen name of Alva John Kiehle. A professional writer
since age sixteen, John Keel was head writer on numerous radio and television
programs, science editor for Funk & Wagnall’s encyclopedia, a syndicated
newspaper columnist, and author of thirteen books and countless published
short pieces for major publications in the U.S. and abroad. He also founded the
New York Fortean Society in 1987.
John Keel
His books include: UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970), Strange

Creatures from Time and Space (1970), Our Haunted Planet (1971), The
Mothman Prophecies (1975), and The Eighth Tower (1976), and Disneyland of
the Gods (1988).
POSITION STATEMENT: I abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) in

1967 when my own field investigations disclosed an astonishing overlap
between psychic phenomena and UFOs. My findings were extremely unpopular
at the time, but in the years since, most of the major European investigators, and
many of the American scientists involved in the subject, have verified and
accepted my conclusions.
Basically, a large part of the UFO lore is subjective and many alleged UFO
events are actually the products of a complex hallucinatory process, particularly
in the contactee and CE III-type reports. The same process stimulated religious
beliefs, fairy lore, and occult systems of belief in other centuries.
A very small percentage of sightings (perhaps less than 2 percent) and
events indicate that other strange, but natural, phenomena are often included, or
absorbed, into the UFO data.
While we cannot satisfactory explain all UFO events in terms of present-day
knowledge and technology, I feel that the ultimate solution will involve a
complicated system of new physics related to theories of the space-time
continuum. It is possible, even highly probable, that a subtle cosmological
system of control has been in effect since the dawn of mankind and that UFOs
are a part of that system.
The objects and apparitions do not necessarily originate on another planet
and may not even exist as permanent constructions of matter. It is more likely
that we see what we want to see and interpret such visions according to our
contemporary beliefs. The problem can be reduced to a series of difficult
philosophical questions and might be explored by behavioral scientists and
mathematicians.
—JOHN A. KEEL
Kelly Cahill abduction A woman, Kelly Cahill, contacted me on October 4,

1993, about a bizarre experience she had near the outer Melbourne (Australia)
suburban housing estate of Narre Warren North, in the foothills of the
Dandenongs, Victoria, during the early hours of August 8, 1993. Because of the
potential significance of the initial report by Kelly Cahill, I referred her to John
Auchettl and his Victorian based group Phenomena Research Australia (PRA).
Kelly Cahill proved to be central to the unraveling of an independently
witnessed CE-3 event with apparent “abduction” dimensions and related
physical evidence.
Entities and craft as described by
Kelly Cahill. (Drawing by Wes Crum)
On their way home, Kelly and her husband were confronted with a
spectacular view of a UFO. They seemed to experience “missing time.”
Subsequent spontaneous conscious recall by Kelly Cahill indicated that the
couple had stopped their car. The large UFO was over a field off the road. They
got out to get a closer look. It was at this point that Kelly recollected seeing
another car that was parked further down the road, which contained at least two
people, a man and a woman. She paid little heed to them at the time, because
they were focused on the UFO that had landed in the field. Kelly recollects
crossing the road to the field, seeing at first one tall black being with glowing
red eyes, then many which seemed to be approaching rapidly, as if gliding. The
large group of tall black beings, seemed to split into two groups, one focused
on Kelly and her husband, and the other one the other people who had also
crossed further down the road.
Kelly found herself screaming out to the other group of people down the
road, “They’re evil. They’re going to kill us.” She was then struck in the
stomach area and fell back onto the ground, somehow unable to see. The rest of
her recollection is somewhat confusing and fragmentary. Voices and blindness
were experienced. She experienced physical effects including marks on her
abdomen.
By November 17, 1993, PRA’s investigation managed to locate the man and
woman apparently seen by Kelly that night. They took PRA back to the
encounter site, to a spot consistent with Kelly’s location of them. The group’s
drawings of the UFO and entities also closely coincide with those of Kelly.
Another woman was with this couple that night.
Bill, the male witness in the trio also, like Kelly’s husband, appears have
also had only limited involvement. The two women had a conscious
recollection up to and including onboard episodes. They recollected the UFO,
and the tall black beings. Their description did not feature the red eyes Kelly
saw. Sketches made by the three women of both the UFO and the beings bare a
striking resemblance.
As they approached the site the trio heard a strange noise and started to feel
ill. The driver, Bill, started to lose control over the car, and ran off the road
striking a pole. After checking for damage they drove on for a short distance.
Throughout this Bill’s vision was impaired. He was unable to remember seeing
the UFO. The two women with him recollected the UFO clearly and their
descriptions matched those of Kelly’s closely. Bill had extensive conscious
recall of smells and sounds, and a lot of activity going on, but does not recall
seeing anything. He subsequently underwent hypnosis, which expanded his
apparent recollections to apparent onboard components but again these were
through the senses of smell and hearing only.
The two women with Bill had a conscious recollection of the UFO, the
beings, and onboard experiences. There was no sense of this, for them, being a
abduction experience, as there seemed to be a “free will” type of situation. The
primary element of their onboard experiences seemed to be a form of
examination. However the abduction episode was not visually remembered.
Other parts of their onboard experience were remembered visually and
consciously. Hypnosis in their cases appeared to have only reinforced their
conscious recollections. There was no apparent speech and very little
information from the entities involved. Marks that resembled pressure rings
around the base of their legs lasted for about two weeks. Each had “rash” like
spotting around the thigh areas and one had swelling of the vaginal area.
This second group described seeing yet another car parked further back
down from them. In it a man appeared to be looking at the UFO’s position
through a break in the vegetation cover. This man has come forward
anonymously providing details that could only have been known to someone
who was there. He had also experienced ligature style marks on his ankles.
This extraordinary case appears to involve independent groups of people
unknown to each other witnessing the same UFO encounter, entities and
experiencing missing time. Two of the groups have been available to
investigators and researchers. There were effects on some of the witnesses,
including gynecological problems, body marks, and ankle ligature-like injuries.
Unusual ground traces at the site of the apparent UFO landing (including three
ground markings about 6 metres apart resembling affected or wilted grass.
Possibly significant levels of pyrene (a polynuclear aromatic compound, which
can be found in coal tar) and above average sulphur content, were noted. There
was also a half moon shaped magnetic trace of a low order). Perhaps for the
first time independent witnesses have been able to provide information that
enabled cross checking and correlations to reveal a striking degree of similar
information, therefore offering a compelling case for the reality of the strange
events described.
References
Cahill, Kelly. Encounter (1996).
Chalker, William C. The Oz Files: The Australian UFO Story (Duffy & Snellgrove, 1996).
_______. “An Extraordinary Encounter in the Dandenong Foothills,: International UFO Reporter
(September/October 1994).
Kelly-Hopkinsville (Kentucky) goblins Probably the granddaddy of all

“occupant sightings in the United States is that which occurred on August 22,
1955, near Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The basic details include the beginning of
the episode when visiting relative Bill Taylor went out to the well for a drink
and came back in to tell of a “spaceship” which had landed in a nearby field.
Just a scant few minutes later the aroused household saw a small specterlike
figure approaching the house.
It appeared to be lit by an internal source, had a roundish head, huge
elephantine ears, a slitlike mouth which extended from ear to ear. The eyes
were huge and wide-set. Only about three or three and one-half feet in height,
the creature had no visible neck, and its arms were long and ended in clawed
hands. Although it stood upright, it dropped to all fours when it ran.
According to the Frank Sutton family, several of these creatures roamed the
area adjacent to the house, climbed trees, and climbed up on the roof. At one
point Sutton fired a shotgun through the screen door at one of the little men.
Although struck and knocked over by the blast, the little fellow got up and
scuttled away on his hands and feet. Later, Taylor walked out the same door,
only to be confronted by one of the creatures on the roof, apparently grabbing
for his head.
This weird sequence of events continued for the grater part of one night, and
finally the family scrambled to the car and drove into town to report their
plight. Deputy Sheriff George Batts and two Kentucky state police came to the
house but found no evidence of the little men’s presence or the “spaceship.”
However, researchers who interviewed the Suttons and carefully investigated
the whole affair, including Isabel Davis of New York (Civilian Saucer
Investigations), were inclined to believe the incident did take place.
One of the creatures as described to artist Bud Ledwith
Local investigators, including Chief of Police Greenwell, said that

“something scared those people—something beyond reason—nothing
ordinary.” One investigator with medical experience noted Sutton’s rapid pulse
beat of 140 per minute, which is about twice the normal rate.
References
Hendry, Allan. “Kelly/Hopkinsville (Kentucky) encounter” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of
UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
Lorenzen, Coral and Jim. Flying Saucer Occupants (Signet/NAL, 1967).
Kentucky abduction The February 1, 1976, issue of the Kentucky Advocate,

published at Danville, Kentucky, carried an article pertaining to UFO sightings
in that general area, among which was the story told by Ms. Louise Smith, Ms.
Mona Stafford, and Mrs. Elaine Thomas about their drive home to Liberty from
a late dinner at the Redwoods Restaurant, located five miles north of Stanford.
The ladies were celebrating Mona Stafford’s thirty-sixth birthday on January
6, 1976. After they left the restaurant—at a point about one mile south of
Stanford—they saw a huge disk-shaped object, which was metallic gray with a
white glowing dome. A row of red lights rotated around the middle, and
underneath were three or four red and yellow lights that burned steadily. A
bluish beam of light issued from the bottom.
The newspaper did not carry a lot of detail, but it was mentioned that when
the women arrived home in Liberty, it was 1:25 A.M. Having left the restaurant
at 11:15 P.M., they should have arrived home by midnight, indicating a time loss
of about one hour and twenty five minutes.
An Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) investigation brought
out the following details: After Mona spotted the object, which was descending
from their right to the left, she asked Louise to speed up as she thought it was a
plane about to crash, and she wanted to help any survivors. Mrs. Smith saw it
clearly, but Mrs. Thomas did not see it until it had stopped at treetop level at
what they estimated to be one hundred yards ahead of them. All of the women
said the object was huge; Louise described it as being “as big as a football
field,” while Mrs. Stafford said it was at least as large as two houses.
Mrs. Smith said that the object rocked gently for perhaps two seconds, at
which time she estimated its size, for it extended beyond the edges of the road
and over the fields on both sides. It then moved across the road to their left,
circling behind and above some houses, and then apparently came back to the
highway and swung in behind the car.
Drawings of the UFO by Louise Smith
At a point in their journey, about a quarter of a mile beyond the houses, the
inside of the car was lit up with a bluish light which came from behind. Mrs.
Smith said that at first she thought it was a state trooper approaching from
behind, but realized almost immediately that it was not. At this point, Louise
and Mona were near panic. The car began to pull to the left, and Louise
screamed at Mona to help her control it. The speedometer was registering
eighty-five miles per hour, and both Mona and Mrs. Thomas shouted at Mrs.
Smith to slow down. Louise held her foot in the air to show them and said: “I
don’t have my foot on the accelerator and I can’t stop it!” Mona reached over
and grabbed the wheel and they fought the “force” together. Then, quite
suddenly, the women experienced a burning sensation in their eyes, and Louise
later described an additional pain which seemed to “go right through the top of
my head! It was almost unbearable!”
The next sensation was that of some “force” pulling the car backward. Also,
they got the feeling that the car was going over a series of “speed bumps.” Mrs.
Thomas began urging Louise to stop so that she could get a good look at the
object, but Mona and Louise were too terrified. Elaine had only a glimpse of
the object as it circled to their left and around behind them, and later
commented about the object’s “beauty.” “I can’t describe it,” she said. “I’ve
never seen red that beautiful. I wanted to get out and look at it.”
Then, the women said, they saw a strange, wide, lighted road stretching as
far as they could see ahead of them. At the same moment, Mona noted that a
red light on the car’s instrument panel had come on, indicating that the engine
had stalled, despite the sensation that they were moving very fast.
At what seemed to be a split second later, the women saw a street light
ahead and realized that they were coming into Hustonville, a full eight miles
beyond where they had encountered the strange craft. They wondered among
themselves how they had gotten there so fast, then became quiet while they
proceeded on into Liberty.
When they arrived at Mrs. Smith’s trailer, they all went inside. Mrs. Smith
went into the bathroom, took off her glasses, and splashed water on her face,
whereupon her hands and face began to burn with searing pain. All three had a
red mark on the backs of their necks, measuring about three inches long and
one inch wide, with clearly defined edges, giving the appearance of a new burn
before it blisters. Louise and Elaine’s marks were centrally located between the
bases of their skulls and the top of the back, whereas Mona’s was located to the
left, behind her ear. They could not account for the marks, which disappeared
two days later. All three were experiencing burning and tearing of their eyes,
but Mona Stafford had a much more severe case of conjunctivitis (an
inflammation of the conjunctiva membrane of the eyes.)
Prior to washing her hands, Louise had taken off her watch and was startled
to see that the hands of her watch were moving at an accelerated rate of speed,
the minute hand moving at the speed of a second hand, and the hour hand was
moving also. Upon experiencing the pain of the water on her hands and face,
she forgot about the phenomena of the watch and does not recall when it
returned to normal or when she reset it.
Concluding that something was wrong, the three ladies went next door to the
home of Mr. Lowell Lee and told him what they had seen. He asked them to go
into separate rooms and sketch the object, and when finished, he found the
resulting sketches to be almost identical.
Although all the women had trouble with their eyes, only Mona Stafford
sought medical help, as her problem was so severe. The doctor who examined
her found no explanation for the pain and tearing, but gave her some eye drops
which helped very little.
On July 23, 1976, the three ladies met in Liberty with Jack C. Young,
president of Professional Polygraph Consultants, Inc., of Lexington, and they
were given a polygraph test.
The pertinent test questions for Mary Louise Smith were the following:
Question: After this experience, were you unable to account for a period of
time that night? Answer: Yes.
Question: This past January 6, did a UFO hover over your 1967 Chevrolet
sedan? Answer: Yes.
Question: During this experience, did you lose physical control over your
automobile? Answer: Yes.
Question: Have you conspired with anyone to create a hoax about this UFO
encounter? Answer: No.
In Mrs. Stafford’s and Mrs. Thomas’s report, as with that of Louise Smith,
Young stated that in his opinion they believed they were telling the truth about
the questions asked. However, Mr. Young did make a comment which should
not be overlooked. He wrote, “Prior to the examination of these three persons,
it was determined by the polygraphist that these persons had been previously
interviewed by Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle and members of the Mutual UFO Network
(MUFON). How much or how little these previous interviews played a part in
what these persons now believe about this alleged encounter cannot be
determined by the polygraphist. I cannot discount the fact that previous
interviews with these persons could influence their personal beliefs as to
whether or not this alleged encounter did or did not occur.”
On July 24, psychologist R. Leo Sprinkle, Professor Emeritus of the
University of Wyoming (also an APRO consultant), conducted hypnotic trance
sessions. What follows is a summary of Dr. Sprinkle’s findings:
“…Mrs. Smith suffered much as she relived the experience. The behaviors,
e.g., weeping, moaning, tossing her head, shuddering, and shaking were evident
to those of us who observed her, especially as she seemed to relive an
experience of a fluid material covering her face.” Sprinkle then goes on to
recount Louise’s claim that her pet parakeet, according to her claims and the
claims of others who observed the bird, refused to have anything to do with her
after the UFO experience. Others could approach the bird and it would not react
wildly; however, whenever Louise came close to the bird, the bird would flutter
and move away from her. The bird died within weeks after the UFO
experience.
Mona Stafford “…responded well to the hypnotic suggestions, and she was
able to describe impressions which led her to believe that she had been taken
out of the car and that she was alone on a white table or bed. She saw a large
eye which seemed to be observing her. She felt as if a bright white light was
shining on her and that there was power or energy which transfixed her and
held her to the table or bed. She experienced a variety of physiological
reactions, including the impressions that her right arm was pinned or fastened,
her left leg forced back under her, with pain to the ankle and foot; pressure on
the fingers of the left hand, as if they were forced or squeezed in some way; a
feeling of being examined by four or five short humanoids who sat around in
“surgical masks” and “surgical garments” while observing her. At one point,
she sensed that she was either experiencing out-of-body travel or else she was
waiting outside of a large room in which she could view another person,
probably a woman, lying on a white bed or observation table. She perceived a
long tunnel, or a view of the sky, as if she had been transported to an area inside
a large mountain or volcano. Although she wept and moaned and experienced a
great deal of fatigue as a result of the reliving of the experience, she felt better
the next day; she expressed the belief to me that she now had a better
understanding of what happened during the loss-of-time experience.
“Mrs. Thomas had been rather quiet during the initial interview in March
1976, although it was obvious that she is perceptive and aware of other people’s
attitudes and feelings. Like the others, she has lost weight, but she has also
experienced some personality changes. She dresses a bit more colorfully now,
and she is more willing to talk and to share her ideas with others. She, too,
experienced a similar reaction during the hypnotic techniques: She apparently
was responding well to suggestions to go deeper; when she relived the UFO
experience, she experienced a great deal of emotional reaction. Her main
impression was that she was taken away from her two friends and that she was
placed in a “chamber” with a window on the side. She seemed to recall figures
which moved back and forth in front of the window of the chamber as if she
were being observed. Her impression was that the observers were four-foot-tall
humanoids, with dark eyes and gray skin. One disturbing aspect of the
experience was the memory that she had some kind of contraption or covering
that was placed around her neck, whenever she tried to speak, or think, the
contraption or covering was tightened, and she experienced a choking sensation
during these moments. At first, Mrs. Thomas interpreted the memories as an
indication that she was being choked by hands or that she was being prevented
from calling out to her friends; later, however, she came to the tentative
conclusion that an experiment was being conducted, and the experiment was to
learn more about her intellectual and emotional processes. She recalled a bullet-
shaped object, about an inch and one half in diameter, being placed on her left
chest; she previously had experienced pain and a red spot at that location.
“During the polygraph examination, and during the initial hypnotic sessions,
each UFO witness was interviewed separately from the other witnesses. After
the initial description of impressions, the women were invited to attend the
additional hypnosis sessions so that each woman could observe the reaction of
the other two women. During these sessions, there was much emotional
reaction, which seemed to arise from two conditions: the compassion of the
witnesses for their friend who was reliving the experience and releasing
emotional reactions to the experience; also, it seems as if the description by one
witness would trigger a memory on the part of another witness, even if the
experiences seemed to be similar or different.
“Certain similarities were observed: a feeling of anxiety on the part of each
witness regarding a specific aspect of the experience. For Ms. Smith, it was the
wall and the gate beyond which she was afraid to move psychologically; for
Ms. Stafford it was the eye which she observed and the impression that
something evil or bad would be learned if she allowed the eye to control her;
for Ms. Thomas, it was the blackness which seemed to be the feared condition
or cause for anxiety. Each woman seemed to experience the impression that she
had been taken out of the car and placed elsewhere without her friends and
without verbal communication. For Ms. Smith, the lack of verbal
communication was most distressing, although she had the feeling that she
would be returned after the experiment.
“Differences were noted in that each woman seemed to have a somewhat
different kind of examination, and in a different location. Ms. Smith did not
have a clear impression of the location, although she did recall a feeling of
lying down and being examined; Ms. Stafford had the impression of being in a
volcano or mountainside, with a room in which a bright light was shining on a
white table with white-clothed persons or humanoids sitting around and
observing her; Mrs. Thomas recalled impressions of being in a dark chamber,
with gray light permitting a view of the humanoids who were apparently
observing her.”
In his conclusive paragraphs, Dr. Sprinkle reports:
“In my opinion, each woman is describing a real experience, and they are
using their intelligence and perceptivity as accurately as possible in order to
describe the impressions which they obtained during the hypnotic regressions
session. Although there is uncertainty about their impressions, especially in
regard to how each person could be transported out of the car and relocated in
the car, the impressions during the loss-of-time experience are similar to those
of other UFO witnesses who apparently have experienced an abduction and
examination during their UFO sighting.
“Although it is not possible to claim absolutely that a physical examination
and abduction has taken place, I believe that the tentative hypothesis of
abduction and examination is the best hypothesis to explain the apparent loss-
of-time experience, the apparent physical and emotional reactions of the
witnesses to the UFO sighting. An interesting subsequent event is that the
women were re-experiencing their physical symptoms that had followed the
January 1976 sightings. When I called them on July 26, the women said that
they were suffering some of the same kinds of symptoms, e.g., fatigue,
listlessness, sensitivity to skin, burning feeling on the face and eyes, fluid
discharge, etc.
“I tried to reassure the ladies that it is not an uncommon experience in
hypnotic regression that persons—after reliving earlier emotional experiences
—may reexperience some of the symptoms which accompany those emotional
reactions.
“I believe the case is a good example of UFO experiences, because of the
number and character of the witnesses…and because of the results of further
investigation through polygraph examinations and hypnotic regression
sessions.”
—CORAL & JIM LORENZEN & R. LEO SPRINKLE
Keyhoe, Donald E. (1897-1988). A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy and

the Marine Corps Officers School, Major Donald Keyhoe (USMC Ret.) was a
Marine aircraft and balloon pilot during World War II. After a night crash in the
Pacific, he was temporarily retired from active duty. During this period he was
Chief of Information, Civil Aeronautics, Department of Commerce (now the
Federal Aviation Administration). Having previously established himself as an
aviation journalist, Keyhoe resumed his writing career after the war.
He was asked to become the director of the National Investigations
Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in 1957, and served in that capacity
for thirteen years. During the period from 1949 to 1973, he wrote several
bestselling books on UFOs in which he championed the government cover-
up/conspiracy theory. His first article on the subject, “Flying Saucers Are
Real,” caused a sensation when published by True magazine in its January 1950
issue. His five books on UFOs are: The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950); Flying
Saucers From Outer Space (1953); The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955);
Flying Saucers—Top Secret (1960); and Aliens From Space (1973).
POSITION STATEMENT: Air Force Headquarters, following a high-level

policy, still publicly denies that UFOs exist, convinced this is best for the
country. But for years the Air Force has had full proof of UFO reality.
During my long investigation of these strange objects, I have seen many
reports verified by Air Force Intelligence, detailed accounts by Air Force pilots,
radar operators, and other trained observers proving the UFOs are high speed
craft superior to anything built on Earth.
Behind the scenes, there are strong efforts to create an official program to
attempt communication with UFO aliens and learn the purposes of the long
surveillance and to take steps toward peaceful contacts if there is no serious
physical bar.
To succeed in communicating with the aliens, we should first end all capture
attempts. No nation so far has been able to duplicate the UFOs control of
gravity and other technical secrets. Ending the UFO chases would not mean
exposing our country to deadly attacks by a fleet of Earth-made UFOs.
Donald Keyhoe
If we had started communicating earlier, we now might know the answers to

all the major questions: the purpose of the long surveillance; the kinds of
beings involved, if they are humanoid or at least not frighteningly different; the
secrets of advanced space travel and many other things of which we have no
knowledge today.
There are scientists who warn against trying to communicate and meet with
highly advanced beings from other worlds. It is true that such meetings would
have a tremendous impact, as the Space Science Board admitted some years
ago. Some “doomsday” writers hint at terrible alien actions which could
destroy us and our world. They believe that the Air Force and the CIA are
hiding some awful discovery the public could never stand.
But today we are already living with the constant danger of surprise nuclear
attack by an enemy nation. We know that such an attack could kill millions of
people and destroy much of our civilization. Yet we do not live in
overwhelming fear.
Whatever the answer to UFO aliens may be, we would not be utterly
paralyzed. The American people have proved they can take shocking situations
—such as World War II—without collapsing in fear. If prepared carefully—and
honestly—they can take the hidden UFO facts, startling as they may be.
(Position statement was adapted from Aliens from Space (Doubleday, 1973;
Signet/NAL, 1974) and the 1978 MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Symposium
Proceedings.)
Kinross (Michigan) jet chase On the night of November 23, 1953, an Air
Defense Command radar detected an unidentified “target” over Lake Superior.
Kinross Air Force Base, closest to the scene, alerted the 433rd Fighter
Interceptor Squadron at Truax Field, Madison, Wisconsin, and an F-89C all-
weather interceptor was scrambled. Radar operators watched the “blips” of the
UFO and the F-89 merge on their scopes in an apparent collision, and
disappear. No trace of the plane was ever found.
U. S. Air Force accident-report records indicate that the F-89 was vectored
west-northwest, then west, climbing to 30,000 feet. At the controls was First
Lieutenant Felix E. Moncia, Jr.; his radar observer was Second Lieutenant
Robert L. Wilson. While on a westerly course, they were cleared to descend to
7,000 feet, turning east-northeast and coming steeply down on the unknown
target from above. The last radar contact placed the interceptor at 8,000 feet, 70
miles off Keeweenaw Point, and about 150 miles northwest of Kinross AFB
(now Kincheloe AFB).
The incident is not even labeled as a “UFO” case in Air Force records;
instead, it was investigated by air-safety experts. There were several layers of
scattered clouds (one with bottoms at 5,000 to 8,000 feet) and some snow
flurries in the general area. Official records state, however, that the air was
stable and there was little or no turbulence.
The Air Force later stated that the “UFO” turned out to be a Royal Canadian
Air Force (RCAF) C-47 “on a flight plan from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to
Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.” The F-89 apparently had crashed for unknown
reasons after breaking off the intercept. In answer to queries from the National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in 1961 and again in
1963, RCAF spokesmen denied that one of their planes was involved.
Squadron Leader W. B. Totman, noting that the C-47 was said to be on a flight
plan over Canadian territory, said “…this alone would seem to make such an
intercept unlikely.”
The Air Force suggested that “…the pilot probably suffered from vertigo
and crashed into the lake.” Harvard University astronomer and UFO debunker
Dr. Donald H. Menzel accepted this explanation, adding that the radar operators
probably saw a “phantom echo” of the F-89, produced by atmospheric
conditions, that merged with the radar return from the jet and vanished with it
when the plane struck the water.
Exactly what happened that night remains unclear, as the Air Force
acknowledges, and serious unanswered questions remain. How likely is it that a
pilot could suffer from vertigo when flying on instruments, as official records
indicate was the case? If the F-89 did intercept an RCAF C-47, why did the
“blip” of the C-47 also disappear off the radar scope? Or, if Menzel’s
explanation is accepted and there was no actual intercept, why did the Air
Force invoke a Canadian C-47, which RCAF spokesmen later stated was not
there?
No intelligence document has yet surfaced that reports the radio
communications between the pilot and radar controllers, and what each was
seeing. Without this information, it is impossible to evaluate the “true UFO”
versus the false radar returns and accidental crash explanations.
—RICHARD HALL

Klass, Philip J. (b. 1919). Philip Klass is best known to the general public as
the world’s leading UFO skeptic. Dubbed “The Sherlock Holmes of UFOlogy,”
by a reviewer, Klass’s books on the subject include UFOs: Identified (1968),
UFOs: Explained (1974), UFOs: The Public Deceived (1983), UFO
Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1989), and The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer
Coverup (1997).
Klass was born in Des Moines and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Upon
graduation from Iowa State in 1941 with a B.S. degree in electrical
engineering, Klass joined General Electric Company as an avionics engineer. In
1952 he accepted a technical journalism position with Aviation Week magazine
(now Aviation Week & Space Technology), and served as Senior Avionics
Editor for 34 years before his semi-retirement in 1986. His 1957 article on
microelectronics, the first ever published on the subject, predicted its
revolutionary impact on the electronics industry. In 1973 Klass became one of
only two journalists ever to be named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers.
Klass has also been honored by the Aviation/Space Writers Association with
awards in 1972, ’74, ’75, ’77, and ’86. In 1989, he received the Association’s
ultimate Lauren D. Lyman Award for a career distinguished by “the qualities of
integrity, accuracy and excellence in reporting.” Additionally, the Royal
Aeronautical Society (London) bestowed its Decade of Excellence Award upon
him in 1998 for lifetime achievement.
One of the original founders of the Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976, Klass has served on
CSICOP’s Executive Council since the outset, and chairs its UFO
Subcommittee. His privately published bimonthly Skeptics UFO Newsletter has
more than 300 subscribers across the U.S. and around the world. And he
continues to write for Aviation Week & Space Technology, living in Washington
with his wife Nadya and their Lhasa apso Shi-Shi.
404 “N” Street, S.W.

Address: Washington, D.C. 20024
U.S.A.
E-mail: PhilKlass@aol.com
POSITION STATEMENT: One of the characteristic fingerprints of

pseudoscience is that the passage of time provides no additional basic
knowledge of an alleged phenomenon. To date, despite the efforts of many
hundreds of UFO investigators, including numerous scientists with Ph.D.s who
believe that some UFOs are ET spacecraft, they have not been able to produce
any scientifically credible evidence to support their views. All that we have
learned is that experienced pilots, law enforcement officers, and even
professional astronomers can readily mistake a bright planet Venus, a meteor-
fireball, or the launch of a multi-stage ballistic missile for a UFO.
Philip Klass
In my nearly fifty years as a Washington-based technical journalist with a

magazine referred to as “Aviation Leak”—because of the sometimes sensitive
material it publishes—I have developed highly placed sources in the
intelligence community and the Pentagon. This enabled me to write, for
example, the first book describing the then “Top Secret” U.S. and Soviet spy
satellites (Secret Sentries In Space, 1971). It would be nearly 25 more years
before the U.S. declassified some details of its early spy satellite program; the
Russians have never done so.
In my 30-plus years of investigating UFO reports—including many of the
most celebrated cases—I have yet to encounter a shred of credible evidence to
suggest that any of those reports involves extraterrestrial spacecraft. Nor have I
found any evidence of a government conspiracy to cover up the “truth” about
UFOs. Had I done so, I would have eagerly published such and graciously
accepted my Pulitzer Prize. Rather, I have observed firsthand how Washington
is incapable of keeping such secrets for so long, and how once-“Top Secret”
documents (now declassified) dating back to the late 1940s make clear that the
government knew nothing of any ET crash at Roswell or anywhere else.
When I first entered the UFO field in the mid-’60s, even the pro-UFO
organizations like NICAP exercised appropriate caution when evaluating
claims from “repeaters,” and especially from “abductees.” Now, no tale is too
wild to be embraced by a large segment of the UFO community. How very sad.
—PHILIP J. KLASS

(Note: The Biographical portion of this entry was written by Gary Posner.)
Klass’s UFOlogical Principles:

UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 1: Basically honest and intelligent persons who are
suddenly exposed to a brief, unexpected event, especially one that involves an
unfamiliar object, may be grossly inaccurate in trying to describe precisely
what they have seen.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 2: Despite the intrinsic limitations of human perception

when exposed to brief, unexpected and unusual events, some details recalled by
the observer may be reasonably accurate. The problem facing the UFO
investigator is to try to distinguish between those details that are accurate and
those that are grossly inaccurate. This may be impossible until the true identity
of the UFO can be determined; in some cases this poses an insoluble problem.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 3: If a person observing an unusual or unfamiliar object
concludes that it is probably a spaceship from another world, he can readily
adduce that the object is reacting to his presence or actions, when in reality there
is absolutely no cause-effect relationship.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 4: News media that give great prominence to a UFO

report when it is first received subsequently devote little, if any, space or time to
reporting a prosaic explanation for the case after the facts are uncovered.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 5: No human observer, including experienced flight

crews, can accurately estimate either the distance/altitude or the size of an
unfamiliar object in the sky, unless it is in very close proximity to a familiar
object whose size or altitude is known.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 6: Once news coverage leads the public to believe that
UFOs may be in the vicinity, there are numerous natural and man-made objects
which, especially when seen at night, can take on unusual characteristics in the
minds of hopeful viewers. Their UFO reports in turn add to the mass excitement,
which encourages still more observers to watch for UFOs. This situation feeds
upon itself until such time as the media lose interest in the subject, and then the
“flap” quickly runs out of steam.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 7: In attempting to determine whether a UFO report is a

hoax, an investigator should rely on physical evidence, or the lack of it where
evidence should exist, and should not depend on character endorsements of the
principals involved.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 8: The inability of even experienced investigators to

fully and positively explain a UFO report for lack of sufficient information, even
after a rigorous effort, does not really provide evidence to support the hypothesis
that spaceships from other worlds are visiting the earth.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 9: When a light is sighted in the night skies that is

believed to be a UFO and this is reported to a radar operator, who is asked to
search his scope for an unknown target, almost invariably an “unknown” target
will be found. Conversely, if an unusual target is spotted on a radarscope at night
that is suspected of being a UFO, and an observer is dispatched or asked to
search for a light in the night sky, almost invariably a visual sighting will be
made.
UFOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE 10: Many UFO cases seem puzzling and unexplainable
simply because case investigators have failed to devote a sufficiently rigorous
effort to the investigation.
—PHILIP J. KLASS
Kottmeyer, Martin S. (b. 1953) Martin Kottmeyer is one of the world’s

leading experts on the psycho-social aspects of the UFO phenomenon. He holds
an associate’s degree in science, but his knowledge of the history of UFO belief
is the source of his achievements.
Kottmeyer has written dozens of articles exploring different facets of UFO
lore while tracing the cultural sources of UFO and extraterrestrial imagery. His
work has appeared in such publications as The Anomalist, Archaeus, Magonia,
The MUFON UFO Journal, The REALL News (newsletter of the Rational
Examination Association of Lincoln Land), UFO Magazine, and The Wild
Places. He works a farm in America’s heartland.
10501 Knolhoff Rd.
Address:
Carlyle, IL 62231
U.S.A.

POSITION STATEMENT: UFO belief is permeated by paranoid themes that
include furtive activities, spying and reconnaissance, influencing machine
fantasies, world-wide conspiracies, invasion fears, persecution, miscegenation
and degeneration, grandeur, cosmic identification, and a ubiquitous stream of
world destruction fantasies. Interpreting the diverse range of UFO experiences in
terms of materially real, but perpetually furtive, aliens runs against many
inconsistencies involving the differences among the cases and assaults against
known science like the absurdities of the hybrid program and man-sized bugs.
Study of the repetitive elements with emphasis on their historical development
lets one achieve an understanding of UFO culture that the ETH forbids. Over
two hundred predictions premised in the extraterrestrial hypothesis by encounter
claimants and UFOlogists have been offered over the past half-century and they
have uniformly failed. Further belief in it is not recommended.
kundalini A Sanskrit term, associated with the image of “a coiled serpent” at

the base of the spine, and uncoiling up the spine, used to express the basic
intelligence and power of the universal life-force resident in the human
body/mind/spirit system. The kundalini is said to affect and influence the major
and minor chakras (energy centers) in the human subtle bodies, and becomes
activated during the normal course of spiritual evolution, but which can be
hastened by specific meditative practices (in particular, various Eastern yogas).
Kundalini is associated with various paranormal experiences, which include
ESP and mystic states, healing powers and telekinesis, plus near-death and out-
of-body events.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
L
Lakenheath-Bentwaters radar-visual UFOs Perhaps the most solid UFO

case in the radar/visual category concerns a series of events which took place
over the flat plains of eastern England on the night of August 13-14, 1956.
Objects were sighted visually from the air by the pilots of two different
aircraft, confirmed by airborne radar on one of the planes, tracked by radar
from three groundradar stations, and sighted visually by control tower
personnel at two ground stations. The UFOs were described as round, white,
rapidly moving objects that could make abrupt changes in speed and direction.
The first radar contact occurred at Bentwaters USAF-RAF Station, thirteen
miles east-northeast of Ipswich, near the coast, at 9:30 P.M. (GMT). The target
was moving at between 4,000 and 9,000 miles per hour, and it covered a
distance of forty to fifty miles in a straight line from where it was first picked
up at about twenty-five to thirty miles east-southeast of Bentwaters to a point
fifteen to twenty miles west-northwest, where it vanished from the screen. The
return reportedly had the characteristics of a normal aircraft target, except for
its abnormally high speed.
About 10:00 P.M., another rapidly moving target appeared on the radar
scopes at Bentwaters and was tracked over a distance of fifty-five miles in
sixteen seconds, which is equivalent to 12,000 miles per hour—too slow to be a
meteor and too fast to be any conventional aircraft. Again, the return was
described as being comparable to that of a normal aircraft and, according to
University of Arizona atmospheric physicist James E. McDonald, who later
studied the case, could in no way be ascribed to anomalous propagation effects.
Also, while the object was being tracked on radar, ground personnel at
Bentwaters saw a blurred light racing overhead, as the pilot of a C-47 aircraft
over the airfield looked down at a blurry light streaking under his plane. (There
is some evidence of anomalous propagation on this night, however: Between
9:30 and 10:15 P.M. the Bent- waters radar tracked a large group of ill-defined
targets that seemed to drift roughly in the direction of the prevailing upper
winds at the time. A search made by a flight of one or two USAF T-33 jet
trainers during this period turned up no evidence of any objects that might have
been producing these radar returns.)
By this time, Bentwaters had alerted another USAF-RAF Station at
Lakenheath, where both radar and visual sightings were likewise taking place.
One luminous object came in on a southwesterly heading, stopped abruptly, and
then streaked out of sight to the east. This was confirmed by two radars, as well
as by visual observations £rom the ground, at Lakenheath. As stated in the
original Project Blue Book report: “Thus, two radar sets (i.e., Lakenheath GCA
[Ground Controlled Approach] and RA TCC [Radar Traffic Control Center]
radars) and three ground observers report substantially the same.” Still another
sighting was reported as £ollows: “Lakenheath Radar Traffic Control Center
observed an object 17 miles east of the Station making sharp rectangular course
in flight. This maneuver was not conducted by circular path but on right angles
at speeds of 600-800 mph. Object would stop and start with amazing rapidity.”
About midnight, while the sightings were taking place at Lakenheath, a call
was placed to the chief fighter controller on duty at the RAF Station at
Neatishead. Within a few minutes, a De Havilland Venom night-fighter
interceptor was scrambled from nearby Waterbeach and vectored toward, first,
a target that was chased and lost, and then, to a second target (over Bed£ord,
just north of Cambridge) that was confirmed by the navigator of the Venom as
the “clearest target I have ever seen on radar” (referring to his own airborne-
radar). At that point the UFO was being tracked simultaneously from the air,
both visually and by radar, and from the ground by radars at Neatishead and at
Lakenheath.
Suddenly, within one sweep (about fifteen seconds) of the radar scopes, the
blip showed up behind the fighter (whereas before it had been in front), and the
pilot requested additional tracking assistance from the ground. In spite of
evasive maneuvers, however, the pilot of the Venom could not shake the UFO,
which continued to follow the plane at a distance of about one quarter of a mile.
The object then (after about ten minutes) became stationary, and the friendly
fighter returned to base. A second Venom was then scrambled but had to abort
its mission because of an engine malfunction. The UFO soon left the range of
both ground radars, moving off the scopes in a northerly direction at an
approximate speed of 600 miles per hour; though at Lakenheath, unknown
echoes continued to be tracked until about 3:30 on the morning of the 14th.
The Condon Report called this “…the most puzzling and unusual case in the
radar-visual files.” And Gordon David Thayer, who was the principal analyst of
the case for the Condon committee, added the following comment in his entry
on the case for The Encyclopedia of UFOs:
In sheer redundancy of contacts this episode is unparalleled by any other

radar-visual UFO case. Three ground radars at two locations plus an
airborne radar—four radars in all, each operating at a different frequency,
pulse repetition rate, etc.—combined, apparently, with the Venom pilot’s
vision all detected something unknown in the same place at the same time.
There is simply no way that any known sort of anomalous propagation
effect could account for this. In fact, any explanation even remotely
conceivable seems to demand the presence of some physical object in the
air over Lakenheath on that August night in 1956. This is why the Condon
Report states: “the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved
appears to be fairly high”—and that was written before it was revealed in
1978 that the Neatishead RAF radar also tracked the same apparent target.
To this day, the Lakenheath-Bentwaters episode remains as one of the most

puzzling UFO cases on record.
—RONALD D. STORY
Lawson, Alvin H. (b. 1929). Dr. Lawson was born and educated in northern
California. He received his A.B. degree in 1952 from the University of
California at Berkeley, and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford, in 1958
and 1967 respectively.
Alvin Lawson
He was an English Professor at California State University, Long Beach, for

more than thirty years. An unusual class he originated, “UFO Literature: The
Rhetoric of the Unknown” (actually a course in rhetorical techniques) was
developed in response to the 1960s call for more relevance in higher education.
In the aftermath of the 1973 UFO flap, student interest was high and the class
was first offered in the fall of 1974 and for ten years after. Lawson operated a
UFO hotline in his home for research, and callers’ abduction claims led him to
Dr. W.C. McCall, his longtime colleague. They carried out the 1977 Hypnosis
of Imaginary Abductees study, which found that imaginary and real abduction
narratives are indistinguishable.
Lawson also formulated the Birth Memories Hypothesis, which argues that
abductions are non-physical, archetypal fantasies in which the witness’ birth
memories play a central role. Lawson is retired in Garden Grove where he lives
with his wife of nearly half a century, watercolorist Barbara Slade Lawson.
E-mail: alawz@earthlink.net
www.geocities.com/
Web site:
Area51/Vault/6521
POSITION STATEMENT: I am a skeptic about abduction claims and an

agnostic about UFO sightings. These are unconnected phenomena and neither
one has much to do with extraterrestrial aliens. CE-3s are fantasy/hallucinations
and are mental rather than physical experiences. UFOs are physically real but
mysterious whatevers.
Dr. W.C. McCall and I carried out a decade of successful hypnotic research
into CE-3 reports, including the Imaginary Abductee Study, all of which led to
the Birth Memories Hypothesis. The BMH shows that abductions are
archetypal fantasies in which witnesses’ birth memories play a central role.
Fantasizing encourages access to birth memories. Every good CE-3 fantasy is
rich in birth imagery, such as fetal humanoids, cervical doors (open from the
middle), and vaginal/umbilical tunnels and tubes. Witnesses interpret their CE-
3s as actual alien visitations but, like analogous mental phenomena such as
shamans’ trances and near-death experiences, abductions are all in the mind.
CE-3s long ago stole the spotlight from UFO sighting reports because
abduction yarns are better at satisfying our alien fantasies. Paradoxically,
human contact with alialiens would be disastrous for the weaker side. We and
our religions and cultures are not ready for bright and sly ETs, and viceversa.
Though humans are made to wonder about what is out there, the wonder cannot
be accounted for. Man’s drive toward the stars is more mysterious even than
UFOs.
—ALVIN H. LAWSON
Levelland (Texas) landings The night of November 2-3, 1957, was one to
remember for the folks of Levelland, a small oil and cotton town (population
10,000) located thirty-two miles west of Lubbock in northwest Texas. The
Soviets had just launched Sputnik II one hour before the UFO events would
begin around Levelland, but news of the launch had not yet reached the general
public.
News of another kind was being created near the formerly obscure west
Texas town, as one or more giant, glowing, egg-shaped UFOs seemed to be
playing games with motorists on the outskirts of town. During a two-and-one-
half-hour period, duty officer A. J. Fowler at the Levelland Police Department
would receive fifteen telephone calls—seven of which correlate remarkably
well.
The first call was received at around 10:50 P.M. from farmhand Pedro
Saucedo, who, along with a companion, Joe Salaz, observed a remarkable and
frightening phenomenon. They were in a small truck along Route 116 about
four miles west of Levelland, when a sudden flash of light drew their attention
to a field just off the right of the road. Suddenly, the yellow-white light rose up
out of the field, picked up speed, and “passed directly over the truck with a
great sound and rush of wind. It sounded like thunder,” reported Saucedo, “and
my truck rocked from the blast. I felt a lot of heat.” Saucedo described the
“object” as “torpedo-shaped, like a rocket,” (Hall, 1964) about 200 feet long,
and apparently “moving at about 600 to 800 miles per hour. (Hynek, 1972)
As the glowing object approached the truck, both the headlights and the
engine failed. As the object departed in the direction of Levelland, the
headlights came back on and the truck could be started without difficulty.
Officer Fowler didn’t know what to make of the report when Saucedo called
in. Perhaps just a drunk, the patrolman thought. Then, about one hour later
(shortly before midnight), Fowler received a second call, from another motorist
later identified as Jim Wheeler, who had just experienced something similar.
Wheeler was driving on Route 110, about four miles east of Levelland—i.e.,
the same general direction in which the UFO was headed when last seen by
Saucedo—when he came upon a 200-foot, egg-shaped thing sitting on the road
in front of him. Wheeler said his lights and motor died also, and, as the strange
glowing oval rose into the sky and blinked out, his headlights came back on.
The next call came at around midnight from Jose Alvarez, who was driving
on Route 51, about eleven miles north of town. It was the same story again: He
saw a glowing oval object sitting on the road in front of him, and his car’s
headlights and engine failed. The “object” took off and his car returned to
normal.
Then, at 12:05 A.M., a student from Texas Tech, Newell Wright, was driving
on Route 116 when he experienced “motor trouble.” Getting out of the car, he
saw ahead of him a large oval object, which he estimated to be about 125 feet
across, glowing blue-green. After a few minutes, the strange object rose
“almost straight up,” headed north, and quickly disappeared. The witness had
no trouble restarting his car.
Frank Williams was the next unwitting victim of head- light and engine
failure. The time was about 12:15 A.M., when he encountered a similar object
on Route 51, close to where Alvarez had his experience. Williams said that the
light was pulsating steadily, on and off, before rising into the air with a noise
like thunder. As before, the car functioned normally once the UFO left.
By this time, Fowler had notified Sheriff Weir Clem, who began searching
the area for the object (or objects) to see for himself.
The time of the next sighting was 12:45 A.M. Truck driver Ronald Martin,
driving along Route 116 just west of Levelland, saw his highlights go out and
felt his engine die “when a big ball of fire dropped on the highway.” (The
A.P.R.O. Bulletin, November 1957) Martin noted that the object changed color
from red-orange to blue-green as it lauded; and then to red-orange again when
it took off.
The seventh witness to call the Levelland Police Department with a detailed
report was James Long, a truck driver from Waco, Texas, who at 1:15 A.M.
reportedly saw a 200- foot-long, egg-shaped object glowing “like a neon sign.”
(Hynek, 1972) This time, the thing was just northeast of Levelland, and the
same electromagnetic effects were noted. The electrical system of Long’s
vehicle failed when relatively close to the object but returned to normal as the
UFO rose up and streaked away.
At 1:30 A.M., Sheriff Clem and Deputy Pat McCulloch, while driving along
“Oklahoma Flat Road” about five miles outside of town, witnessed the UFO
themselves. They spotted an oval-shaped light, “looking like a brilliant red
sunset across the highway.” (Hynek, 1972)
Two days later, on November 5th, the U.S. Air Force dispatched an
investigator who spent less than one day in the area and hastily dismissed the
sightings as “ball lightning.”
Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, a scientific consultant to the Air Force at the
time, agreed, and debunker Donald Menzel (another astronomer and noted
UFO debunker) echoed this explanation in his book, The World of Flying
Saucers, published in 1963. However, some years later, Hynek had second
thoughts on the matter, which he expressed in his 1972 book, The UFO
Experience:
Captain Gregory, then head of Blue Book, did call me by phone, but at that
time, as the person directly responsible for the tracking of the new Russian
satellite, I was on a virtual around-the-clock duty and was unable to give it
any attention whatever. I am not proud today that I hastily concurred in
Captain Gregory’s evaluation as “ball lightning” on the basis of information
that an electrical storm had been in progress in the Levelland area at the
time. That was shown not to be the case. Observers reported overcast and
mist but no lightning. Besides, had I given it any thought whatever, I would
soon have recognized the absence of any evidence that ball lightning can
stop cars and put out headlights. (Hynek, 1972)
Nor is ball lightning known to have a preference for landing on dirt roads
and paved highways, as these “objects” reportedly did.
We must also consider the enormous size (around 200 feet across) of most of
the objects reported, a factor that again seems to rule out the phenomenon of
ball lightning, which is not known to attain such gargantuan proportions.
Whatever happened that night, at least six witnesses experienced something
very similar and extraordinary, independent of each other: an incredible UFO
display within a ten-mile radius of Levelland, which has never to this day been
satisfactorily explained.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
The A.P.R.O. Bulletin, November 1957. Hall, Richard H., ed. The UFO Evidence (NICAP, 1964).
Hynek, J. Allen. The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry (Henry Regnery, 1972; Ballatine Books, 1974).
Menzel, Donald H. and Boyd, Lyle G. The World of Flying Saucers (Doubleday, 1963).
Webb, Walter N. “Levelland (Texas) sightings” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs
Light Years (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987). Gary Kinder relates the story of a
rural Swiss contactee, Eduard Meier, who claims to be in frequent contact with
a group of alien beings from the Pleiades star system. Meier produced hundreds
of photos of his visits from Pleiadian starships. These sharp, high quality
photos of hovering disks attracted many believers, including the actress Shirley
MacLaine who made a pilgrammage to Meier’s door. The book author could
not figure out how or if the photos were faked. As for the Pleiadian visitors,
Meier claimed they are led by a German-speaking female named Semjase, who
looks just like a beautiful Earth woman with amber hair and blue eyes.
Lorenzen, Coral E. (1925-1988). A prolific writer of UFO books and articles,

Coral Lorenzen was perhaps best-known for her role as the founder of the
pioneering and long-standing Aerial Phenomena Research Organization
(APRO).
Born in Hillsdale, Wisconsin, Coral attended public schools in Barron,
Wisconsin, graduating from high school in May 1941.
Her interest in the UFO phenomenon began on a summer day in 1934, when,
at the age of nine, she and two playmates saw a hemisphere-shaped white
object cross the western sky from south to north in an undulating trajectory.
Three years later, during a routine eye examination, she mentioned the object to
the family doctor, Harry Schlomovitz, who loaned her the books of Charles
Fort to show her that strange objects had been seen in the sky for many years.
This sparked an interest in astronomy and she began reading books dealing
with that subject, and combing periodicals and newspapers for information on
the strange objects. She married L. J. (Jim) Lorenzen on September 29, 1943,
and worked at various jobs during his tour with the Army Air Transport
Command in India, including shipfitting for the Navy and assemblyline work
for Douglas Aircraft.
Her second sighting came on June 10, 1947, in Douglas, Arizona. She had
put her daughter to bed and was outside watching for meteors, when she saw a
tiny, round, lighted object leave the ground in the south and move quickly
straight up into the sky until it disappeared from sight. On June 24, 1947,
Kenneth Arnold made his famous sighting over Mount Rainier in the state of
Wash- ington.
During the next five years Mrs. Lorenzen made many contacts with people
interested in the subject of UFOs, and in January 1952, she began contacting
them to form a group (APRO), with the main idea being to preserve
information which otherwise would have been lost to history. She was sure, in
view of the publicity given the UFOs in bigcity papers, that hundreds of
additional sightings had been made in rural areas but were never reported or
were buried in the pages of small-town newspapers. Besides the reports being
publicized, it was to the problem of past reports that APRO members addressed
themselves.
In the early years, most of the work was done by Mrs. Lorenzen and she
served as director until 1964, when Mr. Lorenzen took over the post. From
1964 to 1988, she served as secretary-treasurer and a member of the APRO
board of directors.
Through the years, Mrs. Lorenzen has also held additional positions as a
correspondent and feature writer for various newspapers, and was employed by
the United States Air Force at Holloman Air Force Base from 1954 to 1956,
where she became familiar with Air Force procedures and missile testing.
She was the author, or coauthor, with her husband, Jim, of seven books:
Flying Saucers—The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space
(originally entitled The Great Flying Saucer Hoax, 1962, 1966); The Shadow of
the Unknown (1970); Flying Saucer Occupants (1967); UFOs Over the
Americas (1968); UFOs—The Whole Story (1969); Encounters with UFO
Occupants (1976); and Abducted! (1977).
POSITION STATEMENT: Although I have, throughout my long involvement

with APRO, seen many changes in the field of UFO research, I realize there is
room, indeed a desperate need, for further change. Specifically, there is a
tendency toward “do your own thing” and little or no cooperation in the field.
There are too many organizations and too many lone researchers who investigate
cases, then file them away where they are unavailable to others for study.
APRO was founded in 1952 and became international in scope in 1954.
However, our biggest step forward came in 1962 with the publication of my
fast book, The Great Flying Saucer Hoax, which attracted the attention of a few
scientists who ultimately recruited others.
In the future, UFO researchers should concentrate on improving the quality
of investigations and, therefore, reports and attempt to see that the results are
made available to the entire scientific community.
Coral and Jim Lorenzen
As far as my opinion of the UFO enigma is concerned, I do not think there

are any hard-and-fast answers at this time. It seems to be a multifaceted
phenomenon and will require much more work than has been expended by the
UFO-research community to date. The most popular theory as to their identity
and origin is the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and in view of the evidence
currently available, it seems to be the most sensible.
Those individuals (generally scientists) who dismiss the UFO problem
without examining the data are very remiss. One has only to see the distress
and wonderment of a UFO witness to realize that something is afoot on this
globe we call Earth.
There are probably several races of intelligent beings in our galaxy alone
who have solved the problem of propulsion which would make visitation to this
planet very possible. Man does not like to accept this possibility because his
ego gets in the way of his reason.
However, the thousands of reports of UFOs in the sky, on the ground, and
accompanied by humanoid but alien-appearing occupants, indicate that a
careful, methodical, and in-depth study of Earth and its inhabitants is underway.
—CORAL E. LORENZEN
Lorenzen, L. J. (1922-1986). Jim Lorenzen was well known in UFO circles as

the international director of APRO (the Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization) and, with his wife, Coral, as the coauthor of many popular books
on UFOs. Born in Grand Meadow, Minnesota, he attended schools in Grand
Meadow and Elkton, graduating from Elkton High School in 1938.
Jim worked as a professional musician until induction into the U. S. Army
Air Corps in 1942, where he was trained as a radio-operator mechanic. He
served with the Air Corps until his discharge in 1945. During that time he
served with the Air Transport Command in the China-Burma-India theater of
operations, receiving the Air Medal with cluster, the Presidential Unit Citation
with cluster, and the Distinguished Flying Cross with cluster.
After his discharge from the Air Corps, Mr. Lorenzen returned to his music
profession until 1950, when he entered the Electronic Technical Institute in Los
Angeles and Broadcasters’ Network Studios for training, acquiring a first-
class Radio/Telephone License. Since then he held positions with various
companies. He was chief engineer for Radio Station WDOR in Sturgeon Bay,
Wisconsin, and chief of communications installations for Christy Shipyards,
Sturgeon Bay. In 1954, he joined Tele- computing Corporation at Holloman Air
Force Base, New Mexico. After serving as chief of electronic maintenance of
the Data Reduction Facility, he transferred to engineering where he served three
years as a junior engineer.
In 1960, Lorenzen accepted a position of senior technical associate with the
Kitt Peak National Obser-vatory in Tucson, Arizona, where he remained until
1967, at which time he left that job to go into the electronic organ business.
Since 1964, Mr. Lorenzen also served as international director for APRO, an
organization which he and Coral Lorenzen founded in January 1952. Also with
Coral, he coauthored five books on UFOs: Flying Saucer Occupants (1967);
UFOs Over the Americas (1968); UFOs—The Whole Story (1969); Encounters
with UFO Occupants (1976); and Abducted! (1977).
POSITION STATEMENT: Study of the UFO mystery is complicated by the fact
that it is so poorly defined. There has been, it seems to me, a tendency to
arbitrarily include under its umbrella many unrelated problems. This stems
probably from an unconscious wish to simplify a sometimes ominously
mysterious universe—to say, in effect, that there is only one all-embracing major
mystery, rather than many potentially disturbing enigmas, and be somewhat
comforted thereby. Such ideas are nurtured by sensationalistic “potboiler”
writers who seem to feel that combining two or more sensational subjects will
give their stories more “gee whiz” appeal. This gives us UFO accounts mixed
with various portions of Sasquatch, teleportation, telepathy, faith healing,
Satanism, new age scriptural interpretation, mediumistic channeling, cattle
mutilations, theosophy, poltergeist phenomena, et cetera, ad infinitum.
We find with consternation, however, that some of the foregoing elements
appear in real, solidly based reports and are left to wonder if science fiction
anticipates the phenomenon or the phenomenon imitates science fiction. We
note in passing that much otherwise acceptable data becomes somehow
contaminated when associated with unacceptable data.
This leads many conventional scientists to give voice to their “unflinching
skepticism” and give “stouthearted expression to the feeling that such
preposterous rumors are an offence to human dignity” to quote C. G. Jung.
(Flying Saucers—A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1959)
I have stated on occasion that APRO exists to solve the many questions
raised by the existence of UFO reports. In practice we soon learn that a major
problem exists in defining the limits of the mystery (i.e., deciding which reports
to include in our study); for there certainly is no obvious way to determine, for
example, which reports are triggered by “nuts and bolts” activity and which are
perhaps psychic projections whose superficial form is dictated by the idea or
rumor of UFOs but which ultimately stem from the internal needs of the
“observer.” Once we have defined the problem, I think we will be well on the
way to its solution. We will not be able to do that until we have learned to come
to grips with its realities which means, in part, to conquer our own biases and
prejudices.
At present, utilizing the principal of parsimony, my “investigative
assumption” is still (as it has been since 1952) that we are dealing with
extraterrestrial visitations as the central core of the problem. Most of the bizarre
fringes I can rationalize as being (1) the actions of one or more advanced
cultures whose technology, motives, and psychology we do not understand
and (2) deliberate deception of the witness through influence of his perception
for the purpose of counter-intelligence.
But perhaps we stand too close to the riddle and do not see the forest for the
trees. Standing back a little we can see the outstanding characteristic of the
UFO phenomenon: It is a mystery! What is the effect of a mystery? It causes us
to think. To puzzle. To ponder. And our consciousness is raised. Maybe that’s
what it’s all about. At any rate the journey is only begun and we have miles to
go before we sleep….
—L. J. LORENZEN
Lost Tribes from Outer Space, The (Editions Alvin Michel, 1974).
Frenchman Marc Dem argues that Jews are God’s chosen people because they
were selectively bred by extraterrestrial visitors. The Jewish race has always
been oppressed by others throughout history because oppression is “like the
process of rejection that sometimes occurs in organ transplants.” Yahweh, the
extraterrestrial visitor who was worshipped as God, found Stone Age humans
to be an inadequate species, so he genetically altered them and the Jews were
the fruit of his creation, destined by their special status to lead humanity out of
ignorance.
Lubbock (Texas) lights The story of the Lubbock lights began on a hot
summer night in August, 1951, as several professors from Texas Tech (W.I.
Robinson, A.G. Oberg, and W.L. Ducker) sat outside in a backyard. A group of
lights flashed overhead. They moved silently, crossing the sky rapidly, and
seemed to be in some kind of loose formation. They were only in sight for two
or three seconds, and none of the professors got a very good look at them.
An hour or so later, the lights reappeared, and this time the professors were
ready. The lights were softly glowing, bluish-green objects in loose formation.
It seemed to the professors that the first group had been in a more rigid and
structured formation than later groups.
Joe Bryant of Brownsfield, Texas, told investigators that he was sitting in his
backyard when a group of lights flew overhead. He described them as having a
“kind of a glow, a little bigger than a star.” Not long after that, a second group
appeared. Neither of the groups was in a regular formation.
There was a third flight, but instead of flying over the house, they dropped
down and circled the building. As Bryant watched, one of the “objects” chirped
and he recognized it immediately as a plover, a bird common in west Texas.
The professors, unaware of what Bryant had seen and heard, set out to
obtain additional information. Joined by other professors and professionals
(including Grayson Meade, E.R. Hienaman, and J.P Brand), Robinson, Oberg,
and Ducker equipped teams with two-way radios, measured a base from the
location of the original sightings, and then staked out the area. Knowing the
length of that line, the time of the sighting, and the location and direction of
flight, they would be able to calculate some important and useful information.
The problem was that none of the teams ever made a sighting.
Then, on August 31st, the case took an amazing turn. Carl Hart, Jr., a
nineteen-year old college freshman and amateur photographer, managed to take
five pictures as the lights flew over his house in the middle of Lubbock.
Joe Harris of the Lubbock newspaper learned about the pictures when a
photographer who worked for him periodically called to tell him that Hart had
used his studio to develop the film. Naturally the newspaper feared a hoax.
Harris, and the newspaper’s lead photographer, William Hans, talked to Hart on
a number of occasions. Harris bluntly asked if the pictures were faked. Hart
denied it. About forty years later, in the 1990s, when asked by researchers what
he had photographed, Hart said that he still didn’t know.
The Lubbock lights, as photographed by Carl Hart, Jr., on August 31, 1951
Hans later decided to try to duplicate the pictures at night from the roof of
the newspaper office. He would attempt to photograph anything that flew over.
He waited, but all he saw was a flight of birds that were barely visible in the
glow of the sodium vapor lamps on the streets below him. He took photographs
of the birds, but when he developed the film, the images were too faint to show
on prints. From his experiment, he was convinced that what Hart photographed
couldn’t have been birds under any circumstances.
Air Force investigations were conducted throughout the fall of 1951.
Investigators were dispatched from Reese AFB on the west side of Lubbock.
They spoke to Hart on a number of occasions. They forwarded copies of their
reports to both Project Blue Book headquarters and to Air Force Office of
Special Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C. First Lieutenant
Edward Ruppelt, chief of Project Blue Book, even made a trip to Lubbock to
speak to the witnesses including Carl Hart.
During those interviews, Hart was advised of his rights under the
Constitution of the United States. The investigators were playing hardball with
the teenager. Between November 6 and 9, 1951, Ruppelt and AFOSI Special
Agent Howard N. Bossert again interviewed Hart. In their report, they wrote,
“Hart’s story could not be ‘picked apart’ because it was entirely logical. He
[Hart] was questioned on why he did certain things and his answers were all
logical, concise, and without hesitation.”
From Bryant’s claim of birds, however, the Air Force investigators
extrapolated that all the Lubbock sightings could be explained by birds. In one
of the reports, the investigators wrote, “It was concluded that birds, with street
lights reflecting from them, were the probable cause of these sightings…”
The problem is that strings of lights in the night skies were seen all over
west Texas. From as far north as Amarillo to as far south as the Midland-
Odessa area, reports of these sorts of sightings were made. Birds and the newly
installed sodium-vapor lamps in Lubbock do not provide an adequate
explanation.
What is relevant here, however, is that Air Force officers made a long,
complex investigation of the sightings. Ruppelt later made it clear that he
believed there to be a plausible, mundane explanation for the sightings. In a
1960 revision to his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt
said the Lubbock Lights were explained by “night flying moths reflecting the
bluish-green light of a nearby row of mercury vapor street lights.”
Of course, that explanation didn’t explain the photographs. Ruppelt wrote
that he never found an explanation for them. “The photos were never proven to
be a hoax but neither were they proven to be genuine.”
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
References
Randle, Kevin D. Conspiracy of Silence (Avon Books, 1997).
Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (Doubleday/Ace Books, 1960).
_______. “Lubbock (Texas) lights” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New
Wheeler, David R. The Lubbock Lights (Award Books, 1977).
lucid dreams These are vivid dream-like experiences in which the person
retains normal waking awareness, as well as a certain degree of control over the
elements of dream imagery and the narrative sequence. There are both Eastern
and Western yogic practices which facilitate the process of achieving the power
to create lucid dreams. This phenomenon is comparable to, but not identical
with the more common experience of out-of-body journeys or “astral travel.”
Some ET contacts are made through lucid dreams, and often involve transfer of
spiritual teaching or messages for humanity.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
M
Maccabee, Bruce (b. 1942). Bruce Maccabee has been a research physicist at
the Naval Surface Warfare Center (formerly the Naval Ordnance Laboratory) in
Washington, D.C., since 1972. Originally from Rutland, Vermont, he received
his B.S. degree in physics, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute
(Massachusetts) in 1964, and his M.S. and Ph.D. (also in physics) from the
American University (Washington, D.C.) in 1967 and 1970 respectively.
Bruce Maccabee
Dr. Maccabee is the Chairman of the Fund for UFO Research, the MUFON
(Mutual UFO Network) State Director for Maryland, and is a member of the
Scientific Board of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). He
has written dozens of papers related to UFO history and case investigations,
and has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows. He has also been a
consultant to the National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and Time-Life Books.
Dr. Maccabee is the coauthor (with Ed Walters) of UFOs Are Real, Here’s
the Proof (1997) and the author of The UFOFBI Connection (2000).
Box 277
Address: Mount Rainier, MD 20712
U.S.A.
E-mail: brumac@compuserve.com
POSITION STATEMENT: From my studies of old and recent reports, and from
direct involvement with several UFO investigations, I have become convinced
that there is something real and new behind the UFO phenomenon. Although I
tend to be a “nuts-and-bolts” man, I would not yet throw out the possibility that
some reports which remain unidentified after investigation (i.e., “true UFO”
reports) are psychological in nature. I don’t think we have enough information at
this time to be able to identify the source or sources (such as extraterrestrial,
interdimensional, time travelers, etc.) of the phenomena which give rise to UFO
reports. However, I think it is time for the scientific community to admit there is
some new phenomenon involved.
—BRUCE MACCABEE
Mack, John E. (b. 1929). John Mack, M.D., is professor of psychiatry at

Harvard Medical School and founding director of the Program for
Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER). Dr. Mack is the author of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Prince of Disorder (a 1976 biography of T. E.
Lawrence), but is best known as a UFO-abduction researcher and the author of
the bestselling 1994 book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.
In 1990, after meeting veteran alien-abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, Dr.
Mack began working with people who seem to have experienced encounters
with unknown intelligences. In 1993 Mack founded PEER to continue this
work, and to explore the varieties of extraordinary experience. His latest book
is called Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters
(1999), wherein he tries to demonstrate “how the alien abduction phenomenon
offers a revolutionary new way of understanding reality and our place in the
universe.” Mack asserts that “the alien abduction phenomenon ushers in a new
era in human consciousness, a time in which we must be willing to embrace the
idea that alien visitation is occurring on some level.” According to the
publisher’s summary: “Passport to the Cosmos reveals the naiveté in our
assumption that our world is devoid of spirits and beings who can cross the
barrier we have built up between the material and immaterial worlds. The book
leads us through the possibility that the alien abduction phenomenon is a
cosmic wake-up call to humans that we do indeed live in a multidimensional
world.”
P.O. Box 398080
Address: Cambridge, MA 02139
U.S.A.
Web site: www.peer-mack.org
Mack’s abductees Because of his stature, as a Harvard professor of

psychiatry, and his influence on the UFO community and others who have read
his bestselling book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994), Dr.
John Mack’s abductees deserve special attention. Each case is summarized here
in the order it appears in Mack’s book, followed by a special commentary by
Joe Nickell.
CASE NO. 1
Ed’s case was important to Dr. Mack because of the timing of his experience
(during Ed’s teenage years) and the vivid recall of his abduction during
hypnosis. Ed says he first learned of his abduction in 1961, two months before
Betty and Barney Hill had their encounter.
A female alien—to whom he was forced to give sperm—told Ed that our
planet would soon be destroyed if humanity continued on its present course.
She conveyed to him that human disharmony with nature was the cause of the
impending disaster. Ed has taken her message seriously and is working to
communicate what he has learned to those who are willing to listen
CASE NO. 2
Sheila was experiencing “spiritual” dreams that had begun shortly after her
mother’s death. Sheila was seeing a psychiatrist to help her with this undue
stress, but had difficulty explaining these dreams to her doctor once she became
convinced they weren’t dreams after all, but actual alien abductions.
Sheila had a difficult time distinguishing fantasy from reality, but through
the use of hypnosis she was able to relive the traumatic abduction experiences
and bring out the repressed feelings that were affecting her life.
CASE NO. 3
Scott’s most vivid memory of abduction which involved terror, paralysis and
extraction of sperm occurred in 1992. Other abductions had occurred
throughout his childhood, which caused physical trauma including headaches
and seizures.
As an adult Scott has undergone an important personal transformation which
has enabled him to confront and move through his abduction experiences. Scott
now considers himself to be both human and alien. He also envisions an
apocalyptic catastrophe in the near future. Scott says the aliens come from a
dying world—a fate that will be ours, unless we soon change our ways.
CASE NO. 4
Jerry’s abduction experiences were mainly sexual in nature, including many

reproductive procedures and involvement with the hybrid entities. These sexual
abductions have caused havoc with Jerry’s human relationships, because she
has difficulty differentiating between normal sex and being raped.
Despite the anguish of there sexual experiences with the aliens, Jerry has
become spiritual in nature. She has become a prolific writer of existentialism.
Jerry has shown a great deal of fortitude and bravery in confronting the
horrendous abduction experiences she encountered and through here writings
has regained her dignity and spiritual strength.
CASE NO. 5
Catherine is a young woman who has been abducted since childhood and
used in sexual experiments by the aliens. In her case, she describes rows and
rows of hybrid babies in tank-like incubators.
Catherine has seen hundreds of other human abductees laying on tables
aboard a space craft waiting to be examined by the aliens. She has had the
unique experience of reliving a past life as an Egyptian painter named
“Akremenon.” Catherine learned from this reincarnation that all life is
connected and that we can’t exist without each other. The aliens wanted to
convey to her not to be so frightened of them but to work with them. Since
then, Catherine’s attitude has changed from fear to “active acceptance.”
CASE NO. 6
Joe, a psychotherapist had early childhood abduction experiences. His later

episodes became memorable when his child, Mark, was born. It seems the both
of them have a dual human-alien existence. Joe perceives his role as a father to
keep Mark connected to his “higher self.”
It seems that the aliens have been involved with Joe’s entire cycle of life and
death. They have been available to him, for as long as he can remember, as
guides and protectors of his spiritual awareness and growth. As a result of his
changing life style, Joe has become more outgoing and has been sharing his
experiences and knowledge with the public.
CASE NO. 7
Sara, a graduate student, brings a spiritual interest into the understanding of

her abduction experiences. She was smart and precocious as a child dabbling in
the paranormal: one activity was being able to levitate others. Sara feels like
she is involved in a special project of bringing the alien species together with
ours through evolution. Once merged, these new hybrid life forms will be more
spiritually advanced.
Sara has one intense abduction experience where she goes through an
illusion of a mirror, which becomes a corridor where she meets a reptilian-like
alien. It gives her information that is still embedded in her consciousness.
CASE NO. 8
Paul expresses himself as a bridge between two worlds. He feels he has the
identities of both human and alien forms. Paul has experienced painful,
terrifying procedures on his body. He relates an incident of being at Roswell,
New Mexico, in 1947, and remembering what happened there—even though it
was nineteen years before he was born.
Paul’s hypnosis sessions were powerful and intense in that he was able to
access knowledge and information that was stored within him, including the
need to save our planet. Paul feels he is here to set an example of love and
understanding to transform human consciousness for the better.
CASE NO. 9
Eva’s mission is one of global healing and peace. Her most powerful
abduction experience was when she remembered her past life as “Omrishi”
from the thirteenth century. To relive this incarnation was to represent Eva’s
journey of her soul.
Eva had the typical physical examination, but the role of abductions is a
process of cleansing the body in order for more knowledge to come through.
She feels she became both alien and human so that the melding of
consciousness would bring about peace and harmony. Communication and
integration of alien wisdom is essential to the advancement of our world.
CASE NO. 10
Dave’s abduction experiences occurred at Pemsit Mountain, a big power

place of Native American legends and traditions. He considers it the “Magic
Mountain.” Dave has gone through the traumatic physical examinations typical
of alien abductions, but he has mostly overcome his fears and has become
aware of a protective female alien named “Velia,” who has been with him
through many previous lifetimes.
Dave feels connected to past life Indian reincarnations and is a student of
power through karate and Chi, which is helping him to gain control of his life.
CASE NO. 11
Peter’s abductions seem to evolve from the usual traumatic invasions to

complex spiritual experiences involving the expansion of his mind and visions
of the future. As an example, Peter passes through some kind of wall of
metaphoric expression where he discovers that he has been chosen to
participate in a special breeding program of aliens and humans.
Peter feels that he is “part alien” and that he is here to impart information
about the impending disasters that may occur. His role also comprises breeding
with the female aliens to create a new race or tribe that would survive any kind
of cataclysm.
CASE NO. 12
Carlos is an artist who uses the special “light” that he experienced in his
abduction encounters. His abductions have been more exploratory in that the
aliens change the energy structure of his body. In fact, Carlos refers to the
aliens as “light beings.” He uses this new energy to create paintings that
activate the need to protect the Earth.
Carlos expresses his feelings of awe as he relates to his abduction
experiences. The nearness of death seems to be a very significant part of
Carlos’ life including a rebirth at the age of one. He compares it to a
transformation of power in the name of healing, both physical and emotional.
CASE NO. 13
Arthur considers himself to be a voluntary abductee. He remembers being

abducted, as a nine-year-old boy, while in a car with his mother and siblings.
Arthur was not afraid. He was told about the danger facing the Earth’s ecology.
Arthur’s abduction experiences included two different kinds of beings: the
“little people,” friendly and loving; and darker ones (Grays) who were more
serious. As he matured, he realized that his alien encounters were instrumental
in the development of this own sense of responsibility on a personal and
corporate level to protect the Earth’s environment.
—ETEP STAFF
POSTSCRIPT: Since the appearance of Dr. Robert A Baker’s pioneering article,

“The Aliens Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited,” in the Skeptical
Inquirer (Winter 1987-88), a controversy has raged over his suggestion that most
“alien abductees” exhibited an array of unusual traits indicating a psychological
phenomenon known as “fantasy-proneness.” Baker cited the “important but
neglected” work of Wilson and Barber (1983), who listed certain identifying
characteristics of people who fantasize profoundly.
Baker applied Wilson and Barber’s findings to the alien-abduction
phenomenon and found a strong correlation. Baker explained how a cursory
examination by a psychologist or psychiatrist might find an “abductee” to be
perfectly normal, while more detailed knowledge about the person’s
background and habits would reveal to such a trained observer a pattern of
fantasy proneness.
For example, Baker found Whitley Strieber—author of Communion (1987),
which tells the “true story” of Strieber’s own alleged abduction—to be “a
classic example of the [fantasy-prone personality] genre.” Baker noted that
Strieber exhibited such symptoms as being easily hypnotized, having vivid
memories, and experiencing hypnopompic hallucinations (i.e., “waking
dreams”), as well as being “a writer of occult and highly imaginative novels”
and exhibiting other characteristics of fantasy proneness. A subsequent, but
apparently independent, study by Bartholomew and Basterfield (1988) drew
similar conclusions.
Wilson and Barber’s study did not deal with the abduction phenomenon
(which at the time consisted of only a handful of reported cases), and some of
their criteria seem less applicable to abduction cases than to other types of
reported phenomena, such as psychic experiences. Nevertheless, although the
criteria for fantasy proneness have not been exactly codified, they generally
include such features as having a rich fantasy life, showing high hypnotic
susceptibility, claiming psychic abilities and healing powers, reporting out-of-
body experiences and vivid or “waking” dreams, having apparitional
experiences and religious visions, and exhibiting automatic writing.
In one study, Bartholomew, Basterfield, and Howard (1991) found that, of
152 otherwise normal, functional individuals who reported they had been
abducted or had persistent contacts with extraterrestrials, 132 had one or more
major characteristics of the fantasy-prone personality.
Somewhat equivocal results were obtained by Spanos et al. (1993), although
their “findings suggest that intense UFO experiences are more likely to occur in
individuals who are predisposed toward esoteric beliefs in general and alien
beliefs in particular and who interpret unusual sensory and imagined
experiences in terms of the alien hypothesis. Among UFO believers, those with
stronger propensities toward fantasy production were particularly likely to
generate such experiences.” (Spanos et al. 1993)
A totally dismissive view of these attempts to find conventional
psychological explanations for the abduction experience is found in the
introduction to psychiatrist John Mack’s Abduction: Human Encounters with
Aliens (1994). Mack states unequivocally: “The effort to discover a personality
type associated with abductions has also not been successful.” According to
Mack, since some alleged abductions have reportedly taken place in infancy or
early childhood, “Cause and effect in the relationship of abduction experiences
to building of personality are thus virtually impossible to sort out.” (Mack,
1994) But surely it is Mack’s burden to prove his own thesis that the alien
hypothesis does have a basis in fact beyond mere allegation. Otherwise the
evidence may well be explained by a simpler hypothesis, such as the possibility
that most “abductees” are fantasy-prone personality types. (Such people have
traits that cut across many different personality dimensions; thus conventional
personality tests are useless for identifying easily hypnotizable people. Some
“abductees” who are not fantasy prone may be hoaxers, for example, or exhibit
other distinctive personality traits or psychological problems.) Mack’s approach
to the diagnosis and treatment of his “abductee”” patients has been criticized by
many of his colleagues (e.g., Cone 1994).
METHODOLOGY
To test the fantasy-proneness hypothesis, I carefully reviewed the thirteen

chapter-length cases in Mack’s Abduction (Chapters 3-15), selected from the
forty-nine patients he most carefully studied out of seventy-six “abductees.”
Since his presentation was not intended to include fantasy proneness, certain
potential indicators of that personality type—like a subject’s having an
imaginary playmate—would not be expected to be present. Nevertheless,
Mack’s rendering of each personality in light of the person’s alleged abduction
experiences was sufficiently detailed to allow the extraction of data pertaining
to several indicators of fantasy proneness. They are the following:
1) Susceptibility to hypnosis. Wilson and Barber rated “hypnotizability” as one

of the main indicators of fantasy proneness. In all cases, Mack repeatedly
hypnotized the subjects without reporting the least difficulty in doing so.
Also, under hypnosis the subjects did not merely “recall” their alleged
abduction experiences but all of them reexperienced and relived them in a
manner typical of fantasy proneness. (Wilson and Barber 1983) For
example, Mack’s patient “Scott” (Case No. 3) was so alarmed at
“remembering” his first abduction (in a pre-Mack hypnosis session with
another psychiatrist) that, he said, “I jumped clear off the couch.” (Mack,
1994) “Jerry” (No. 4) “expressed shock over how vividly she had relived
the abduction,” said Mack. Similarly, “Catherine” (No. 5) “began to relive”
a feeling of numbness and began “to sob and pant.” (Mack, 1994)
2) Paraidentity. I have used this term to refer to a subject’s having had
imaginary companions as a child and/or by extension to claiming to have
lived past lives or to have a dual identity of some type. Of their fantasy-
prone subjects, Wilson and Barber stated: “In fantasy they can do anything
—experience a previous lifetime, experience their own birth, go off into the
future, go into space, and so on.” As well, “While they are pretending, they
become totally absorbed in the character and tend to lose awareness of their
true identity.” (Wilson and Barber, 1983)
Thus, as a child, “Ed” (Case No. 1) stated: “Things talked to me. The
animals, the spirits…I can sense the earth.” “Jerry” (No. 4) said she has had
a relationship with a tall extraterrestrial being since age five. At least four
of Mack’s subjects (Nos. 5, 7, 9, and 10) said they have had past-life
experiences, and seven (Nos. 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, and 12) said they have some
sort of dual identity. For example “Dave” (No. 10) said he considers
himself “a modern-day Indian,” while “Peter” (No. 11) under hypnosis said
he becomes an alien and speaks in robotic tones. (Mack 1994) In all, eleven
of Mack’s thirteen featured subjects exhibited paraidentity.
3) Psychic experiences. Another strong characteristic of fantasy proneness,

according to Wilson and Barber, is that of having telepathic, precognitive,
or other types of psychic experience.
One hundred percent of Mack’s thirteen subjects claimed to have
experienced one or more types of alleged psychical phenomena, most
reporting telepathic contact with extraterrestrials. “Catherine” (Case No. 5)
also claimed she can “feel people’s auras.” “Eva” (No. 9) said she is able to
perceive beyond the range of the five senses; and “Carlos” (No. 12) said he
has had “a history of what he calls ‘visionary’ experiences.” (Mack, 1994)

4) “Floating” or out-of-body experiences. Wilson and Barber stated: “The
overwhelming majority of subjects (88 percent) in the fantasy-prone group,
as contrasted to few (8 percent) in the comparison group, report realistic
out-of-the-body experiences” which one subject described as “a weightless,
floating sensation” and another called “astral travel.” Only one of Mack’s
thirteen subjects (No. 2) failed to report this. Of the other twelve, most
described, under hypnosis, being “floated” from their beds to an awaiting
spaceship. Some said they were even able to drift through a solid door or
wall, that being a further indication of the fantasy nature of the experience
(more on this later). Also, “Eva” (No. 9) stated that she had once put her
head down to nap at her desk and then “saw myself floating from the
ceiling….My consciousness was up there. My physical body was down
there.” Also, in the case of “Carlos” (No. 12), “Flying is a recurring motif
in some of his more vivid dreams.” (Mack, 1994)
5) Vivid or “waking” dreams, visions, or hallucinations. A majority of

Wilson and Barber’s subjects (64 percent) reported they frequently
experienced a type of dream that is particularly vivid and realistic.
Technically termed hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinations (depending
on whether they occur, respectively, while the person is going to sleep or
waking), they are more popularly known as “waking dreams” or, in earlier
times as “night terrors.” (Nickell, 1995) Wilson and Barber reported that
several of their subjects “were especially grateful to learn that the
‘monsters’ they saw nightly when they were children could be discussed in
terms of ‘what the mind does when it is nearly, but not quite, asleep.” Some
of Wilson and Barber’s subjects (six in the fantasy-prone group of twenty-
seven, contrasted with none in the comparison group of twenty-five) also
had religious visions, and some had outright hallucinations. (Wilson and
Barber, 1983)
Of Mack’s thirteen selected cases, all but one (Case No. 13) reported
either some type of especially vivid dream, or vision, or hallucination. For
example, “Scott” (No. 3) said he had “visual hallucinations” from age
twelve. “Jerry” (No. 4) recorded in her journal “vivid dreams of UFOs” as
well as “visions.” and “Carlos” (No. 12) had the previously mentioned
“visionary” experiences and dreams of flying. Almost all of Mack’s
subjects (Nos. 1-11), like “Sheila” (No. 2), had vivid dreams with strong
indications of hypnogogic and/or hypnopompic hallucinations. (Mack,
1994)

6) Hypnotically generated apparitions. Encountering apparitions (which
Wilson and Barber define rather narrowly as “ghosts” or “spirits”) is
another Wilson-Barber characteristic (contrasted with only 16 percent of
their comparison group). A large number of the fantasizers also reported
seeing classic hypnogogic imagery, which included such apparition-like
entities as “demontype beings, goblins, gargoyles, monsters that seemed to
be from outer space.” (Wilson and Barber, 1983)
Mack’s subjects had a variety of such encounters, both in their apparent
“waking dreams” and under hypnosis. Only the latter were considered here;
all thirteen subjects reported seeing one or more types of outer-space
creatures during hypnosis.

7) Receipt of special messages. Fifty percent of Wilson and Barber’s
fantasizers (contrasted with only eight percent of their comparison subjects)
reported having felt that some spirit or higher intelligence was using them
“to write a poem, song, or message.” (Wilson and Barber, 1983)
Of Mack’s thirteen abductees, all but one clearly exhibited this
characteristic, usually in the form of receiving telepathic messages from the
extraterrestrials and usually with a message similar to the one given
“Arthur” (Case No. 13) “about the danger facing the earth’s ecology.”
Interestingly, many of these messages just happen to echo Mack’s own
apocalyptic notions (indicating that Mack may be leading his witnesses).
In the case of “Eva” (No. 9), the aliens, who represented a “higher
communication,” purportedly spoke through her and described her “global
mission.” “Jerry” (No. 4) produced a “flood of poetry,” yet stated, “I don’t
know where it’s coming from.” “Sara” (No. 7) has been “spontaneously
making drawings with a pen in each hand [of aliens]” although she had
never used her left hand before; and “Peter” (No. 11) stated he has “always
known that I could commune with God” and that the aliens “want to see if
I’m a worthy leader.” (Mack, 1994)
RESULTS
One of Mack’s subjects (“Sheila,” No. 2) exhibited four of the seven

fantasy-prone indicators, and another (“Arthur,” No. 13) exhibited five; the rest
showed all seven characteristics.
Although not included here, healing—that is, the subjects’ feeling that they
have the ability to heal—is another characteristic of the fantasy-prone
personality noted by Wilson and Barber. At least six of Mack’s thirteen subjects
exhibited this. Other traits, not discussed by Wilson and Barber but
nevertheless of possible interest, are the following (together with the number of
Mack’s thirteen subjects that exhibit it): having seen UFOs (9 cases); New Age
or mystical involvement (11); Roman Catholic upbringing (6 of 9, whose
religion was known or could be inferred); previously being in a religio-
philosophical limbo/quest for meaning in life (10); and involvement in the arts
as a vocation or avocation (5). For example, while apparently neither an artist,
healer, nor UFO sighter, “Ed” (No. 1) had “a traditional Roman Catholic
upbringing” and—as rather a loner who said he felt “lost in the desert”—he not
only feels he can “talk to plants” but said he has “practiced meditation and
studied Eastern philosophy in his struggle to find his authentic path.” “Carlos”
(No. 12) is an artist/writer/ “fine arts professor” involved in theatrical
production who said he has seen UFOs and has a “capacity as a healer”; raised
a Roman Catholic, and interested in numerology and mythology, he calls
himself “a shaman/artist teacher.” (Mack, 1994)
Also of interest, I think, is the evidence that many of Mack’s subjects
fantasized while under hypnosis. For example—in addition to aliens—“Ed”
(No. 1) also said he saw Earth spirits whom he described as “mirthful little
playful creatures”; and “Joe” (No. 6) said he saw “mythic gods, and winged
horses.” “Joe” also “remembered” being born. “Catherine” (No. 5), “Sara” (No.
7), “Paul” (No. 8), and “Eva” (No. 9), said they had past-life experiences or
engaged in time-travel while under hypnosis. Several said they were able to
drift through solid doors or walls, including “Ed” (No. 1) “Jerry” (No. 4),
“Catherine” (No. 5), “Paul” (No. 8), “Dave” (No. 10), and “Arthur” (No. 13).
“Carlos” (No. 12) claimed his body was transmuted into light. I have already
mentioned that under hypnosis “Peter” (No. 11) said he becomes an alien and
speaks in an imitative, robotic voice. In all, eleven of Mack’s thirteen subjects
(all but Nos. 2 and 3) appear to fantasize under hypnosis. Of course it may be
argued that there really are “earth spirits” and “winged horses,” or that the
extraterrestrials may truly have the ability to time travel or dematerialize
bodies, or that any of the other examples I have given as evidence of
fantasizing are really true. However, once again the burden of proof is on the
claimant and until that burden is met, the examples can be taken as further
evidence of the subjects’ ability to fantasize.
CONCLUSIONS
Despite John Mack’s denial, the results of my study of his best thirteen cases
show high fantasy proneness among his selected subjects. Whether or not the
same results would be obtained with his additional subjects remains to be seen.
Nevertheless, my study does support the earlier opinions of Baker and
Bartholomew and Basterfield that alleged alien abductees tend to be fantasy-
prone personalities. Certainly, that is the evidence for the very best cases
selected by a major advocate.
—JOE NICKELL
(Note: I am grateful to psychologists Robert A. Baker and Barry Beyerstein for

reading this study and making helpful suggestions.)
References
Baker, Robert A. “The Aliens Among Us: Hypnotic Regression Revisited,” Skeptical Inquirer (Winter
1987-88).
Bartholomew, Robert E. and Basterfield, Keith. “Abduction States of Consciousness,” International UFO
Reporter (March/April 1988).
Bartholomew, Robert E., Basterfield, Keith, and Howard, George S. “UFO Abductees and Contactees:
Psychopathology or Fantasy Proneness?” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice (1991).
Cone, William. 1994. Research therapy methods questioned. UFO 9(5): 32-34.
Mack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).
Nickell, Joe. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons and Other Alien Beings (Prometheus Books, 1995).
Spanos, Nicholas P.; Cross, Patricia A.; Dickson, Kirby; and DuBreuil, Susan C. “Close Encounters: An
Examination of UFO Experiences,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology (1993).
Wilson, Sheryl C., and Barber, Theodore X. “The Fantasy-Prone Personality: Implications for
Understanding Imagery, Hypnosis, and Parapsychological Phenomena” in Sheikh Anees A., ed.
Imagery: Current Theory, Research, and Application (John Wiley & Sons, 1983).
Maitreya The Buddhist Sanskrit title and name for the Buddha to come,
comparable in definition and purpose to the Cosmic Christ, Hebrew Messiah,
and Islamic Imam Mahdi. Maitreya is channeled by some New Age teachers
and is associated with “the return of the Christ”, the establishment of the
Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and the Harvest or Ascension.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Majestic 12 (MJ-12) documents In December of 1984 a Los Angeles UFO

researcher named Jaime H. Shandera allegedly received, anonymously, a roll of
unprocessed 35-mm film. He contacted an associate, William L. Moore, co-
author (with Charles Berlitz) of The Roswell Incident (1980), and the two had
the film developed. On it were two purported government documents marked
“TOP SECRET/EYES ONLY.” If genuine, the papers would prove that the
United States had recovered crashed saucers in the American southwest and
that President Harry S. Truman authorized “Operation Majestic Twelve” to
handle such matters.
Another MJ-12 document surfaced later, reportedly discovered by Moore
and Shandera at the National Archives in the summer of 1985. Still others
appeared in 1992, allegedly left in the mailbox of a little-known researcher, and
in 1994 an “MJ-12 Special Operations Manual” appeared on a roll of film sent
anonymously to UFOlogist Don Berliner (Klass, 1999).
That the documents were available only as copies effectively prevented
examination of paper, ink, etc. However it also raised questions about their
provenance (i.e., history or chain of ownership). While prominent UFOlogist
Stanton T. Friedman defended the authenticity of the first three documents (but
not others), forensic analysis revealed their spuriousness (Klass, 1990; Nickell
and Fischer, 1990).
One document, a seven-page “BRIEFING DOCUMENT: OPERATION
MAJESTIC 12 / PREPARED FOR PRESIDENTELECT DWIGHT D.
EISENHOWER” bore a pseudomilitary date format, containing an extraneous
comma: “18 November, 1952.” Another incorrect feature was the use of a zero
with single-digit dates, e.g. “On 07 July, 1947….” These two anomalous date
features are separately distinctive and all the more so when found together. The
combination has not been discovered in genuine documents of the period
(although, interestingly, it appeared in personal letters written by William L.
Moore during the 1980s). While the “briefing document” was purportedly
written by Rear Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, a linguistic expert found stylistic
elements that were “uncharacteristic” of Hillenkoetter and suggested that the
text could have been an imitation of his style (Nickell and Fischer 1990).
Note that characters are not aligned with numerals, indicating a composite.
The other document, a “MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF

DEFENSE,” dated September 24, 1947, was seriously flawed. Labeled a
memorandum, it bore a salutation—an element reserved for letters. No such
incompetent hybrid memo/letter has ever been shown to emanate from
President Truman’s office. Moreover, although cited in the “briefing document”
as an executive order, the memo/letter was given a bogus executive order
number. Other problems concerned the typewriting. For example, careful
inspection reveals that the numerals of the date are out of alignment with
respect to the other characters, thereby indicating they were typed at a different
time. (Nickell, 1996)
Also, the positioning of Truman’s signature is atypical.
President Truman invariably placed his signature close to the text, as is shown in the top two
examples. With the “T” as a radius, an inscribed circle cuts well into the typewriting. However,
the questioned “MJ-12” example (which follows) fails this test.
Most importantly, the signature exactly matches the signature on a known

Truman letter, showing—in the words of a professional document examiner—
that the “memo” signature was “a classic signature transplant, i.e., a genuine
signature employed in a photocopy forgery.”
Philip J. Klass (1990) correctly described the match as the “smoking gun” in
the MJ-12 case, clearly proving forgery.
As to the document allegedly found in the National Archives—ostensibly a
carbon copy of a memorandum from Robert Cutler (special assistant to
President Eisenhower) to USAF Chief of Staff General Nathan Twining—the
National Archives issued a statement questioning its authenticity on numerous
grounds. For example, it lacked a requisite “Top Secret register number.” Also,
on the day the memo was purportedly written—July 14, 1954—Cutler was
actually away from Washington (Klass 1990; Nickell and Fischer 1990). The
subsequently appearing MJ-12 documents of 1992 and 1994 similarly suffer
from scrutiny. (For a discussion see Klass 1999.)
Truman signature from authentic letter matches one on an “MJ-12” memo (although multiple
copying has rendered the text darker and slightly stretched). Since no two individual signatures
are identical, this demonstrates that the questioned document is spurious.
While a few UFO researchers who lack document expertise continue to

argue otherwise, the scientific and scholarly evidence unquestionably proved
the MJ-12 documents are forgeries.
—JOE NICKELL
References
Klass, Philip J. “New Evidence of MJ-12 Hoax,” Skeptical Inquirer (Winter, 1990).
_______. “Dr. Robert Wood Emerges as New Promoter of MJ-12 Authenticity,” Skeptics UFO Newsletter
(January, 1999).
Nickell, Joe. Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents. (The University Press of Kentucky,
1996).
Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. “The Crashed-saucer Forgeries,” International UFO Reporter
(March/April, 1990).
Mandelker, Scott (b. 1962). Scott Mandelker integrates the principles of

Ageless Wisdom with the spiritual dimensions of ET contact and UFO
research. He has an M.A. in Counseling, Ph.D. in East-West Psychology, and
over 20 years practice in Buddhist Zen and Vipassana.
Scott Mandelker
His first book, From Elsewhere: Being ET in America (1995) explored the
lives of people who claim to be ET souls on Earth. His second book, Universal
Vision: Soul-Evolution and the Cosmic Plan (2000), reveals the cosmic plan
behind global ET contact, and the basic tools of spiritual self-healing,
emotional balance, and mystic meditation.
Dr. Mandelker has taught throughout Japan and Israel, and continues to offer
workshops and counseling in the U.S., including presentations for MUFON,
UFO conferences, and the Whole Life Expo. He has appeared on over 70 radio
and TV shows, including The Art Bell Show, Strange Universe, Hard Copy, and
UFOAZ. He makes his home in San Francisco.
PMB 201
Address: 2130 Filmore St.
San Francisco, CA 94115
E-mail: scott@universal-vision.com
Web site: www.universal-vision.com
POSITION STATEMENT: Given my background in meditation and years of

paranormal experience, my position on UFOs is different from most researchers.
I have no doubt that some UFOs come from extraterrestrial sources, including
other star systems, older civilizations, and other dimensions of reality, not yet
understood by mainstream science. I hold these beliefs simply because I have
had numerous direct contact experiences, and I trust the validity of these so-
called paranormal events.
Some UFOs are made of physical materials, while others are “thought-form”
holographs and energy-plasma devices. Since UFOs come from a wide range of
ET groups, their nature is variable. However, ET agendas are relatively fixed:
they are either benevolent or not. This idea is fully supported by almost all
religions, East and West, plus all traditions of Ageless Wisdom
In the near future, there will certainly be “open contact” with ET groups, but
the effects upon humanity depend on when such contact occurs. If it occurs in
the next decade, our response will be largely be the same as it is today:
continued doubt and disbelief among some, fascination and adoration among
others, with continued manipulation and co-optation by various human groups
who seek to maintain their positions of power and prestige.
After the next decade, however, there will be a rapid expansion of human
consciousness. Open contact then will quickly lead to willing cooperation,
unified cohabitation, and long-term alliance. I have no doubt this will usher in a
“golden age” on Earth, far beyond our greatest hopes.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Manna Machine, The (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1978). British authors George
Sassoon and Rodney Dale, both engineers, did a technical translation of the
manna-making device of the Old Testament, as described in the ancient Hebrew
book The Kabbalah, to conclude that extraterrestrial visitors gave the Jews this
food producing machine so they could survive 40 years in the desert, and
disguised it as the Ark of the Covenant. Since the device was probably a
neutron-pumped laser, converting nuclear energy into light, it produced
radiation which accounted for the plagues recounted in the Bible as having
accompanied the Ark wherever it went.
man-made UFOs Very little detailed research has been conducted into the
subject of man-made UFOs and secret military aircraft. One of the problems is
that the UFO and aviation research communities have, historically, gone their
separate ways. It is, therefore, not surprising to learn that new and important
discoveries have been made by those of people with an interest in UFOs and
secret military aircraft; these include respected aviation journalist Bill
Sweetman, U.S. military monitor and aviation writer Steve Douglass, U.K.
astronomy and aviation expert Bill Rose, and Nick Cook of Jane’s Defence
Weekly.
Research has shown that many secret aviation projects were undertaken both
during and after the Second World War. The Horten Brothers and Alexander
Lippisch in Germany, and Jack Northrop in the U.S. all developed and flew
aircraft of radical, triangular design.
It is also the case that a classified German disk-plane project was started by
the Heinkel company at its plant in Marienhe, Northern Germany, in 1942, and
that a primitive, disk-like aircraft was tested with support from BMW at
Prague-Kbely airfield from 1944. Perhaps only two jet-powered disks were
constructed by this German team. Talk of superior Nazi “anti-gravity”
technology —the “Vril” and “Haunebu” saucers—is a simple fantasy and has
no basis in fact. Nevertheless, a CIA document released in the 1970s and dated
1955 notes the development of a secret man-made flying saucer by the A.V.
Roe Company of Malton, Ontario, whose English designer, John C Frost, took
his ideas from a “group of Germans.” Another early document, dated 10
November 1947, circulated to Counter Intelligence Corps operatives in
Germany, states that flying saucers “may have been developed from the
original plans and experiments conducted by the Germans prior to
capitulation.”
This craft is described by four anonymous aerospace retirees as America’s man-made UFO.
(Artist: William Louis McDonald)
During the war the U.S. Navy sponsored the development of a diskplane
known as the XF5U-1, built by the Chance-Vought Company of Bridgeport,
Connecticut. Contrary to the official history put out by both the U.S. Navy its
apologists within the aviation research community, it is suspected that this
aircraft was reworked and that a jet-powered version, the XF5U-2, was flown at
Muroc Field (now Edwards AFB) from mid-1947 and may have been
responsible for the famous saucer sighting at the base on the 8th of July.
Other aircraft, like the Douglass Skyray, had a saucer-like shape and, along
with other experimental aircraft in the 1950s, may have been responsible for
some UFO reports. In fact, it is my contention that an almost unbroken line of
disk-planes was developed in secret—largely by the U.S. Navy—from the late
1940s onwards. We have reports of man-made disk-planes operating during
Navy maneuvers in 1952, 1958, and 1959; and intriguing evidence of U.S.
Navy disk projects discovered in newly-acquired FOIA documents.
One important and instructive story relates to the work of Frank Carlson. His
testimony puts much of the genuine concern surrounding Groom Lake/Area 51
and Bob Lazar’s “S4” site into perspective. According to his wife Debra,
interviewed in 1992 in Los Angeles, Carlson was a Korean War veteran and
Master Sergeant formerly assigned to F-86 and later F-104 Starfighter
maintenance teams. He was well liked and highly skilled, and moved to
Edwards AFB in 1959. From 1960-62 he was involved in highly classified
work at a remote Nevada test site known by projects workers and their wives as
“The Facility” or “The Ranch.” The Facility was, in fact, located at Papoose
Lake and was not known as “S4” at that time. Here, work was continuing on a
secret and radical flying saucer design based upon original work undertaken by
the AVRO team in Canada. The aim was to build a high-speed “disk-
interceptor” able to take out more advanced Soviet aircraft of similar design—
possibly based upon plans recovered from the Prague facility in 1945—which
were probing the North American Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar defenses
with alarming regularity from the late 1950s onwards.
The problem with the U.S.-built system was the engine. We know a little
about the highly advanced radial-flow engine because it is shown in previously
Top Secret rated documents released in 1995 and dated 1955. The document in
which this is shown relates to another AVRO disk known as Project Silver Bug.
The Silver Bug disk-plane was configured for supersonic flight and vertical
take off—not unlike the mysterious Carlson saucer. The engine was so
advanced that we suspect it could literally not be relied upon to do its job at that
time.
A Hughes Corporation missile system, the hypersonic (Mach 5) AIM-47A
was said by Carlson to have been developed for use specifically with the
classified disk. Other disk-plane projects were said to have the designations D-
5A and RD-7A, the latter being a much-larger multi-engine version.
In the final analysis, according to Carlson, the disks were replaced by less
radical though classified aircraft like the A-12 proposed by Lockheed Skunk
Works in 1961, the YF-12A interceptor and ultimately the SR-71 Blackbird spy
plane. Nevertheless, the work at Papoose Lake had been mirrored by classified
activities at Holloman AFB within the White Sands Missile Range.
Not unlike many other former test site workers, Carlson was struck down by
a mystery cancer in the late 1980s, having moved to Los Angeles where he
owned and ran a small machine shop.
In 1967, former combat veteran and U.S. Air Force magazine editor Jack
Pickett saw four rusting jet-powered disk-planes of between approximately 30
and 100-ft. diameter in a compound at McDill AFB in Florida. Shocked by his
sighting, he raised the matter with the base CO and was subsequently debriefed
by USAF Intelligence personnel who told him the true story of the classified
disk program. Pickett noted the designation “UL” on one of the aircraft tail fins
which experts tell us indicates construction prior to 1962 by a joint Bell-Vought
team. Furthemore, Pickett testifies that he was tasked to release part of the story
of the disks to the public via one of his Air Force in-house magazines and that
the story was only pulled at the last minute after an accident involving a more
advanced disk-plane at the nearby Avon Park facility. Pickett is still alive and is
a highly respected journalist. There is every reason to believe his story and the
testimony adds considerable weight to our other claims.
The 1950s was a time when contractors like Lockheed, Bell, General
Dynamics, Northrop and A.V. Roe learned the business of hiding classified
aircraft from the public. The CIA, as stated in a 1952 memorandum, sought to
use flying saucers for “psychological warfare,” whilst the hardware was
effectively “hidden” behind a smokescreen of developing myth and fantasy
relating to alien saucers, “men from outer space” and, later, tales of “alien
contact.” Some of this was, quite clearly, encouraged by CIA and other
intelligence operatives placed within the UFO research community.
The evidence for this view includes a 1999 interview by Nick Cook with
former General Dynamics boss Bob Widmer, a man at the peak of his
profession and with great knowledge of the inner workings of the “black
projects” world. Widmer not only testified to the illegal destruction of
documents relating to his still-classified 1950s high Mach Kingfish airplane but
that the secrecy was overwhelming in every respect. Widmer also stated that
the aircraft they sought to build was a flying saucer with the back cut out. The
Kingfish is said to have been a delta (triangular) aircraft and although disk-
plane projects continued up until the early to mid 1980s and were under
development by the U.S. Navy at China Lake in California, a strategic decision
appears to have been made in the 1970s whereby the more efficient and
aerodynamically effective delta came into general use.
Many companies, including Lockheed-Martin, had classified triangular
aircraft under development from the early 1960s—the Lockheed Gusto being a
case in point. Rockwell, Northrop and Teledyne-Ryan proposed a number of
manned and unmanned aircraft in the 1970s although these are not well-known.
The way in which classified aircraft can be and were hidden is clear from
our knowledge of the stealth program of the mid-1970s. The Top Secret F-117A
Nighthawk interdictor was developed at the Groom Lake and later Tonopah
facilities in Nevada. Although the prototype Have Blue aircraft was flown from
1978, the finished product was not declassified until 1989! And the F-117A,
and the more advanced low observable Northrop B-2 Spirit— another aircraft
mistaken for a UFO by virtue of its shape—are but two of many classified
aviation projects whose budgets are massive and said to be somewhere in the
region of $40-50 billion per year. This figure, and the lack of congressional
oversight relating to these programs, is a good enough reason for the secrecy;
the secrecy itself adds a major financial component to any classified program
although this, it is argued, guarantees Western military superiority.
In recent years, starting with the Hudson Valley, New York, UFO “flap” of
1982-1990 and in Belgium from November 1989, triangular aircraft of differing
design have been seen by hundreds of witnesses. Despite the expected majority
of misidentifications, it is clear that a structured, almost noiseless and slow-
moving aircraft of considerable size was seen. Although UFOlogists have
claimed that these reports are evidence of “alien” or “back-engineered”
technology our research has highlighted the development of massive lighter-
than-air vehicles, not dissimilar to those conceived and test-flown by the
Aereon Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. Aereon,
though a small company, is strongly suspected to have designed LTA vehicles
later developed by the military-industrial complex for reconnaissance.
The Aereon Corporation worked closely with the U.S. Navy during the 1970s to develop massive
lighter-than-air platforms for reconnaissance, mapping, and transport. Sources suggest that a
massive LTA platform along these lines might have been responsible for some UFO sightings.
These aircraft, and those using a range of emerging technologies, are built of
Kevlar, a light but incredibly strong material that is itself carbon-based and
therefore excellent for stealth. They can fly at very low speeds and often use an
advanced electric propulsion system that leads to reports of “humming noises”
and blue coronal discharges from the craft. Many reports indicate remarkably
maneuverability, and the craft are said by a variety of sources—including the
Federation of American Scientists—to be up to 600 feet in length. Every time
they are used outside the usual testing areas their flight can be hidden behind
the “alien technology” smokescreen. Reports of massive triangular platforms
from South-West England, the location of two former test facilities (Boscombe
Down and Yeovilton), during the 1990 Belgium flap therefore come as no
surprise. Neither do reports from the North West English coast of black
triangular aircraft under escort by RAF Tornados!
From the point of view of the UFO researcher and the public at large, these
slow-moving platforms are of greater importance than the near-mythical
triangular spyplanes like Aurora. In UFO Revelation (1999) I detail the
existence of the Advanced Airborne Reconnaissance System (AARS), also
known as “Tier 3,” in the early 1990s. This was a slow-moving triangular
aircraft and was said by insiders to utilize electrochromic plates to change the
color and hue of the craft in flight and to move “at walking pace.”
Add to this a new generation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and
stealth helicopters, which bring the many developments of the last 50 years to
their logical conclusions, then we have an impressive range of military
hardware that must be responsible for its fair share of UFO reports. However,
given the secrecy and paranoia surrounding these projects, it is likely that new
information will only emerge in very small pieces as we move further into the
21st century.
Only if we remember that circular and triangular aircraft are configured for
flight within an atmosphere will be understand the terrestrial, military origins of
these remarkable machines.
—TIM MATTHEWS
(For more information, see: Matthews, Tim. UFO Revelation: The Secret
Technology Exposed? (Blandford, 1999).
Mars and Martians Scientific speculation about intelligent life on Mars has
shaped both popular ideas about extraterrestrials and efforts to understand
UFOs. In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed narrow
lines across the face of Mars and designated them canali, or channels.
In most English translations these lines became “canals,” a name connoting
an artificial structure. The canals in Schiaparelli’s 1877 drawings did not look
especially artificial, but some writers were quick to jump on the possibility and
develop the theme. Schiaparelli then made an even more amazing discovery
while observing the planet in 1881-1882.
Over a period of days or even hours, some of the canals seem to “double”—
that is, where one canal appeared before, two appeared in its place. These
double canals were often thin, straight lines running sometimes for thousands
of miles in perfect parallel. He realized the implications of this discovery and
published his results in an obscure Italian scientific journal, but to no avail. The
popular press soon spread these observations far and wide as proof that Mars
was home to intelligent beings capable of vast engineering projects.
Martian “canals” as drawn by Schiaparelli in 1886
The question of Mars and its canals became the most exciting issue in
astronomy. In 1894, the American astronomer Percival Lowell built his famous
observatory on a site west of Flagstaff (in Arizona) which came to be known as
“Mars Hill.”
He quickly became the most active observer of the red planet and a
vociferous publicist for the theory of an inhabited Mars. Lowell rejected the
earlier view of the planet as a world with oceans linked by the canals, and
proposed instead that Mars was a dying planet. Its seas and thick atmosphere
had departed with its evolutionary youth. The remaining water was locked in
the polar caps. When they melted in the spring their moisture revived the
vegetation, which appeared as dark gray or blue-green areas on the surface of
Mars. The melting polar caps filled the canals with water, which was then
distributed to the ancient Martian cities that were stranded amid vast reddish
deserts. The visible canals were not the waterways themselves but strips of
vegetation, probably cultivated lands, over pipelines constructed to conserve
the precious remaining water. In summer, when the polar runoff was greatest,
the Martians opened a second canal to handle the overflow. According to
Lowell, the Martians were more advanced than us in science, technology, social
organization, and physical evolution.
Other astronomers saw the canals as nothing more than natural spots and
shadings on the surface of Mars, joined into long straight lines by deceptions of
the human eye and the will to believe. This controversy continued through the
1920s, with most astronomers persuaded that the canals were in fact optical
illusions. The Mariner and Viking probes of the 1960s and 1970s ultimately
bore out this explanation.
Canals were not the only Martian mysteries suggesting intelligent life there.
Bright spots observed on the planet around the turn of the century were
interpreted by the popular press as signals, though Lowell and other astronmers
scotched these rumors by explaining them as clouds. A few decades later, a vast
cloud shaped like a “W” formed periodically over the same area of the surface.
Again popular interest was excited, but again astronomers called on natural
forces. During the 1920s several experimenters with radio, including
Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla, believed they picked up radio signals
from Mars. In 1937 a Japanese astronomer saw a brilliant spot suddenly appear
on the surface,followed by a large cloud. This observation suggested a meteor
or volcanic eruption to astronomers in the 1930s; but by the 1950s, a new
possibility was suggested: now the events fit the pattern of an atomic explosion.
If no physical canals marked the surface of Mars, their idea has left an
indelible impression on literature and popular belief. In 1897, H. G. Wells drew
on Lowell’s theory as the basis for his novel, The War of the Worlds, which
assumed the Martians were intelligent enough to escape their dying planet and
attempt a migration to Earth. This most famous alien invasion story provoked a
major panic when Orson Welles broadcast a radio version in October 1938. A
survival motive as the reason for extraterrestrials coming to Earth has appeared
in the UFO literature from time to time, and is prominent in current
speculations about the purpose of abductions.
A Dweller on Two Planets_(1899), dictated by the Martian Phylos to
Frederick S. Oliver by automatic writing, tells of Martians coming to Earth in
aerial craft to visit Atlantis and Lemuria, and prefigures the later “ancient
astronaut” literature. Theodore Fluornoy wrote From India to the Planet Mars
(1900) describing the visionary travels of a young woman who brought back an
elaborate description of the Martian landscape and civilization, much like
modern UFO contactees.
Life-on-Mars beliefs intersected with UFO reports from an early date. A
report out of South America in 1877 alleged the discovery of a meteor
containing the body of a being from Mars. Most 1897 airships were credited to
an earthly inventor, but a minority opinion blamed the airships on Martians
coming to Earth on an exploratory mission.
Several landing yarns included Martians, such as a St. Louis man who
visited with two humans who looked like Adam and Eve but indicated they
came from Mars before flying off in their airship; and the Aurora, Texas, crash,
where a local expert in astronomy looked at the pilot’s body and said he must
have been a Martian.
Mars was still a viable candidate for life in the 1950s, and many writers tied
UFOs to that planet. Gerald Heard identified the UFOnauts as bee-like
Martians in his book, Is Another World Watching? (1951). Some contactees
claimed to have visited Mars or met Martians; and hoaxer “Cedric Alling-ham”
gave away the origin of his contact in the title, of his book, Flying Saucer from
Mars_ (1955).
More serious UFOlogists discerned a correspondence between 1950s UFO
waves and oppositions of Mars, though from 1957 onward this relationship has
broken down. A flurry of excitement began around 1960 when a Soviet
scientist proposed that the moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, were artificial
satellites. They seemed to behave like Sputnik. Moreover, they were not
discovered until 1877, the same year as the canals, yet smaller telescopes could
and should have detected these bodies. A reasonable conclusion would be that
they were launched just prior to 1877; therefore Mars is presently home to a
native civilization advanced enough to launch huge space stations and send
probes to Earth, or a base for visitors from beyond the solar system. Further
understanding of artificial and natural satellite dynamics exploded this notion.
With the landing of the Viking Mars probes in 1976, hope for life on the
planet flickered out. Not even simple plant life or bacteria greeted the
expeditions from Earth. Yet thanks to those probes, a new Martian controversy
began over the so-called “Face on Mars”: a formation found in some Viking
photos with a remarkable resemblance to a human face. The surrounding
formation have impressed some people as artificial and city-like, and led to
speculations that an ancient civilization once inhabited the planet.
Alas, now yet another Martian myth bites the dust. On April 5, 1998, the
Mars Orbital Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft photographed
these features at different sun angles and at ten times the resolution of the
previous images. Even computer enhancements of the pictures show no
resemblance to a “face” or anything else, except randomly scattered rocks and
hills of the natural Martian landscape.
If present-day supporters of the extraterrestrial hypothesis have had to look
beyond the solar system for the origin of UFOs, the legacy of the life-on-Mars
controversy has accompanied the search. Ideas of superior alien intellects with
body forms different from ours were boosted into popular consciousness as
never before by scientific and literary treatments of Mars. Notions of a dying
planet and aliens seeking out the Earth for purposes of their own have persisted
in UFO lore down to the present.
Mars rock Known technically as sample #ALH84001, this potato-sized

Martian meteorite contains what most scientists believe is fossilized bacteria
from the planet Mars.
What looks like a worm in this photo may be the first known example of life beyond the Earth.
In August of 1996, headlines around the world announced “Life on Mars.”

Though disputed by some scientists, most support the conclusion that this 4.2-
lb. chunk of basalt does indeed contain the first evidence of life beyond the
Earth.
The meteorite, discovered in Antarctica in 1984, is believed to have arrived
on Earth between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago; probably the result of a comet
or asteroid impact to the planet Mars some 16 or 17 million years before that.
With the explosive force of perhaps a million hydrogen bombs, the ejecta from
the impact, according to this scenario, probably escaped the weak Martian
gravity to assume orbits around the sun until encountering the Earth at the
opportune point.
We know the rock is from Mars, because it contains chemical markers—
known from samples taken by the Viking lander—that “fingerprint” the
Martian atmosphere. The conclusion that the rock contains a 3.6 billion-year-
old life-form is drawn from four separate lines of evidence, which are highly
technical in nature.
There is strong evidence, as well, that the early Mars had running water, and
perhaps even oceans, covering much of its surface.
—RONALD D. STORY
Matthews, Tim (b. 1967). Tim Matthews is an English researcher of UFOs and
the paranormal. He holds an Honours degree from the University of Lancaster
in Classical Music as well as numerous music diplomas and awards. He is the
Commercial Editor for Quest for Knowledge and Beyond magazines—both
U.K. newsstand publications. His investigation into man-made UFOs has been
both controversial and pioneering. Some of this work was published to critical
acclaim in his book UFO Revelation: The Secret Technology Exposed?
(Blandford, 1999) and concludes that some of the “classic” UFO cases
(McMinnville, 1950; Main-brace, 1952; Hudson Valley, 1980s; and Belgium,
1989/90) actually relate to the testing, development and operation of secret
military aircraft of circular and triangular design.
Matthews is at the forefront of research into American and British secret
military aircraft programs begun during the Second World War and which have
been largely ignored by UFOlogists. He has obtained files and holds an archive
of some 4,000 pages of Freedom of Information Act material from various U.S.
archives.
He is a regular guest on Jeff Rense’s Sightings radio show and many U.K.
radio and TV programs where his lively and hardhitting debating style is well-
known.
He lives in Lancashire with his wife Lynda, daughter Alexandra Maia, and
three Jack Russell Terriers. He is a keen soccer fan and sports fanatic.
c/o Discovery
BCM 4067
Address:
London WC1N 3XX
England
E-mail: TMMatthews99@aol.com
POSITION STATEMENT: I have investigated dozens of cases across the U.K.,

particularly those in Northern England. I believe that there are many causes for
UFO sightings—not one simple “catch-all” explanation. My own research
indicates that nine out of ten cases have a relatively simple explanation;
misidentification of stars and planets, aircraft lights and so on. Nevertheless, a
few cases indicate a much deeper mystery, some involving mysterious
paranormal phenomena and “earthlights” of natural origin.
I have investigated cases which clearly point to the operation of secret
military aircraft—often hidden from us by a combination of media fascination
with fantastic alien stories and imagery, the extra-terrestrial prejudices of the
UFO community and the American government whose secret projects have
been responsible for the growth in a multi-billion dollar, and largely
unaccountable, underground economy.
—TIM MATTHEWS
McDonald, James E. (1920-1971). The main proponent in the scientific

community during the mid-late 1960s that UFOs probably represent
extraterrestrial visitation, McDonald conducted intensive research on UFO
data, both theoretical and in the field, interviewed hundreds of UFO witnesses,
and attempted to interest other scientists in the data. He lectured widely on the
subject to many scientific societies and played a key role in Congressional UFO
hearings in 1968.
A critic of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, and the methodology and
conclusions of the Air Force-sponsored University of Colorado UFO study,
McDonald analyzed all of the cases in the university’s Condon Report and
concluded that many of the Colorado explanations were not well founded.
Before his death in 1971, McDonald was granted access to the official Air
Force UFO files from the former Project Blue Book, which were then housed at
Maxwell Air Force Base, in Alabama. His analyses of these case files, many of
which had only just been declassified, convinced him further that UFOs
represented a physical phenomena of scientific importance, and that the
hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitation appeared to be the least unlikely in
explaining many of the reports. He was also critical of J. Allen Hynek, the Air
Force’s scientific consultant for over twenty years, for not bringing the data to
the attention of other scientists. McDonald left no published book outlining his
conclusions or thoughts on UFOs; he concentrated, instead, on the continuing
analysis of UFO data. He privately published many short monographs based on
his lecture presentations or specific UFO topics or cases.
James McDonald
Both before and after receiving his Ph.D. in physics at Iowa State College
(now University) in 1951, McDonald taught meteorology there, first as an
instructor (1946-49), then as an assistant professor (1950-53). He was a
research physicist in the University of Chicago’s department of meteorology
(1953-54), later joining the University of Arizona faculty, first as an associate
professor (1954-56), then as a full professor (1956-71) in the department of
meteorology (now atmospheric sciences). Concurrently, he was a senior
physicist in the university’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, of which he
served as associate director (1954-56) and scientific director (I 956-57).
McDonald was a consultant to numerous federal agencies, including the
National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the Office of
Naval Research, and the Environmental Science Service Administration (now
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
His principal research interests related to physical meteorology, the physics
of cloud and precipitation processes, meteorological optics, atmospheric
electricity, and weather modification.
POSITION STATEMENT: If there were even a slim possibility that the Earth
were under extraterrestrial surveillance in any form, that would be a matter of
the greatest scientific importance, warranting the most rigorous investigation. In
fact, the evidence that seems to point to the conclusion that UFOs could be such
devices is far from negligible; yet because of the history of official and scientific
response to the earlier UFO reports, we continue to see mainly neglect or
ridicule on this intriguing question.
After examining around a thousand UFO reports and directly interviewing
several hundred witnesses in selected UFO cases of outstanding interest, and
after weighing alternative hypotheses, I find myself driven steadily further
toward the position that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is the least unlikely
hypothesis to account for the UFO. That hypothesis is, of course, not original
with me; it has been urged for many years by persons knowledgeable with
respect to the UFO problem, who spoke from outside scientific circles. Our
collective failure to examine scientific aspects of the UFO problem will, I fear,
be held against the scientific community when the full dimensions of the UFO
evidence come to be recognized.
The type of UFO reports that are most intriguing, and point most directly to
an extraterrestrial hypothesis, are close-range sightings of machinelike objects
of unconventional nature and unconventional performance characteristics, seen
at low altitudes, and sometimes even on the ground. The general public is
entirely unaware of the large number of such reports that are coming from
credible witnesses because ridicule and scoffing have made most witnesses
reluctant to report openly such unusual incidents. When one starts searching for
such cases, their number are quite astonishing. Also, such sightings appear to
be occurring 0 over the globe.
The sooner we take a serious new stance and confront the UFO question
with adequate scientific talent and staffing, the less embarrassing will be the
ultimate admission that we have been overlooking a problem of potentially
enormous scientific importance to a humanity.
—ETEP STAFF
(Position statement was abstracted and adapted from the monograph Are UFOs
Extraterrestrial Surveillance Craft? The monograph was based on a talk given
by McDonald before the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in
Los Angeles, California, March 26, 1968.)
McMinnville (Oregon) photos The photographer, Mr. Paul Trent, took two
photos of an object which he claimed was flying past his farm (near
McMinnville, Oregon) on May 11, 1950. These classic photos are important in
terms of their quality and credibility, having withstood close scrutiny over time.
The images are clear, and their investigation has been stringent.
Photo #1
The Trents (who both witnessed the UFO) originally treated the photos
rather casually, waiting several weeks to have them developed, and then they
only showed them to family members. A friend suggested they take the photos
to their banker. The banker subsequently alerted a local newspaper reporter,
William Powell, who interviewed the Trents in detail at their home. He
analyzed the negatives in considerable detail at the newspaper office and then
decided that, despite the incredible nature of the subject, it was beyond the
capabilities of the Trents to have created such a hoax. He then published full-
frame prints and blowups of the UFO in the (McMinnville) Telephone Register
on June 8, 1950. The following week the now famous photos were published in
Life magazine.
The basic history of this case (up to 1973) was summarized by William K.
Hartmann in the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (edited by E. U.
Condon and D. Gillmor, 1969) and by Philip J. Klass in UFOs Explained
(1974)—except for the claim by the Trents that they were visited by two “FBI
men” several weeks after the photos were taken. The FBI has denied
involvement in the case.
Powell also claimed that the newspaper office was visited by two U.S. Air
Force officers who confiscated all of his prints. There is a document that
discusses the Trent case in the files of the Office of Special Investigations of
the Air Force, now on microfilm at the National Archives.
Close-up of object in Photo #1
When Hartmann investigated the Trent case, he interviewed the witnesses

and performed careful photometric and photogrammetric analyses of the
original negatives. By use of a clever photometric argument, he was able to
establish “to within a factor of four” that the object was about 1.3 km away
from the camera in the first photo. At the conclusion of his analysis, he stated
that “all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical appear to
be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery,
metallic, disk-shaped, tens of meters in diameter, and evidently artificial, flew
within sight of two witnesses.” He then included the disclaimer that the
evidence does not positively rule out a hoax, although certain “physical factors
argue against a fabrication.” (Gillmor, 1969)
Robert Sheaffer, at the request of Philip Klass, analyzed blown-up prints and
discovered shadows of the eave rafters on the east wall of the nearby garage.
Sheaffer used these shadows to argue that there was a considerable time lag
between the photos and that the photos must have been taken in the morning
rather than in the evening, as claimed by the Trents. He also criticized
Hartmann’s photometric analysis for failing to take into account the “spillover”
of light (veiling glare) onto the UFO image if there were fingerprints on the
camera lens.
Photo #2
The writer (Maccabee) obtained the original negatives in 1975, and found
that the shadows on the garage wall did not provide any evidence for a long
time lag between photos (the witnesses claimed that there was probably less
than thirty seconds between photos). I also repeated Hartmann’s photometric
calculation, but included corrections for veiling glare and the assumed
illumination of the bottom of the UFO in photo #1 by ground reflected light in
his analysis. I concluded that, if the bottom of the UFO were not itself a source
of light, the object would have been more than 1 km distant, with resulting
dimensions greater than 30 meters in diameter by 4 meters thick. In a
computer-aided study of the negatives, William Spaulding (in Proceedings of
the 1976 Center for UFO Studies Symposium) found no evidence of a wire or
thread suspending the object (if it were hanging from the wires clearly visible
over the object), and he also found an excessive fuzziness of the image which
might be related to atmospheric effects if the object were distant.
In order to account for the excessive brightness of the bottom of the UFO in
photo #2, I suggested and rejected the hypothesis of internal lighting, and then
suggested that the upper part of the object might be translucent. I then
proceeded to test the brightness distributions of the bottoms of various small
UFO models made of paper and plastic.
Close-up of object in Photo #2
I found that under the lighting conditions similar to those expected at the
time of the photos, the brightness of the bottom of a translucent UFO model
would not be uniform, whereas the brightness of the image of the bottom of the
object photographed by the Trents was very uniform. Thus I concluded that if
the object was a hoax, the Trents must have suspended some nonuniform
translucent object.
A detailed photogrammetric analysis has failed to prove that the object was
suspended beneath the overhead wires. However, the photogrammetric analysis
has turned up an interesting coincidence between the amount of angular motion
of the UFO between photos as claimed by Mrs. Trent in 1950, and the amount
actually recorded by the photos. The Portland Oregonian of June 10, 1950,
states: “During this time the object moved across the horizon through an arc of
about 15 degrees, according to her description.” The actual angle between the
sighting lines to the UFO in photos #1 and #2 is about 17 degrees.
Although Klass has argued that the discrepancies between the original
accounts of the sighting as expressed in the original newspaper stories are
evidence of a hoax, because they didn’t get their stories straight, these
discrepancies could also have resulted from attempts by the witnesses to
reconstruct what would have taken place several weeks before they were
interviewed by the newspaper reporters. Thus, these discrepancies are relatively
unimportant.
However, one major discrepancy does exist. One would expect that the
Trents could remember whether the photos were taken in the morning or in the
evening just before sunset, as stated in the original reports and as repeated
many times by Mrs. Trent. The shadows of the east wall of the garage are sharp
and suggestive of a small bright source in the sky east of the garage. According
to Sheaffer, the shadow positions suggest that, if they were made by the sun,
the sun was approximately due east of the garage wall. This would place the
time at about 7:30 A.M. on the eleventh of May, 1950. Sheaffer has argued that
no source but the sun could have made such shadows. On the other hand, Mrs.
Trent has repeatedly claimed that Mr. Trent went on a milk run every day early
in the morning after they took care of the farm animals. This milk run would
have lasted from 6:30 or 7 A.M. to later than 9 A.M. under normal circumstances.
Thus, he would not have been available to take the photos in the morning.
Furthermore, a detailed photometric study of the shadows under the garage
eave provides evidence which appears to contradict the sun-shadow hypothesis.
The shadow image that provides the most data for evaluation is that of the edge
of the roof. Densitometric scans of this shadow show that it is sufficiently
smeared in a vertical direction to have been made by a source which has an
angular vertical extension of between 5 and 10 degrees, whereas the angular
size of the sun is only about one half a degree. A study of the effects of haze
and clouds on the “effective angular size of the sun” showed that, when nearly
obscured by clouds, the sun has an effective angular size of no more than about
1.5 degrees. On the other hand, the rather sharp width of the shadows of the
eave rafters suggest that the source must have had a relatively small horizontal
extension, probably not exceeding about 2 degrees.
Both Sheaffer and Hartmann have argued that it would be impossible for a
bright cloud to cause shadows similar to those on the east wall of the Trent
garage. A detailed theoretical analysis showed that it might be possible under
certain conditions. However, the main argument for the possibility that a bright
cloud at sunset could have caused such shadows comes from photographic
evidence taken by the writer in July 1977. Although the average brightness of
the cloud was only about four times that of the sky, the shadows were very
noticeable, with a contrast comparable to the 20 percent or so contrast between
the illuminated areas and the areas shaded by the eave rafters on the Trent
garage. The weather report for McMinnville on May 11, 1950, indicates that
cumulous clouds were present during the afternoon. Whether or not a single
cumulous cloud would have been east of the Trent farm at sunset is, however,
impossible to determine from evidence independent of the Trent photos.
Over the years since the photos were published, numerous investigators have
talked with the Trents about their sightings. The first interviewer was William
Powell. He was convinced the Trents were telling the truth, as was the
newspaper editor, P. Bladine. The banker, F. Wortmann (now deceased), wrote
in 1969 to the late Dr. James McDonald that Mr. Trent “is an individual who
can be relied on without any question.” In response to letters from P. Klass in
1969 and 1972, Wortmann restated his firm belief “as to the truth of the whole
thing.” In a “spot intelligence report” to the Air Force Office of Special
Investigations, Sergeant L. J. Hyder referred to the Trents as “substantial, solid,
honest citizens of the community.” The late Frank Halstead, an astronomer,
interviewed the Trents in 1958 and stated in a letter to Major Donald Keyhoe
that “they seemed to be very sincere people.” Halstead’s letter contains the first
reference to an “FBI” investigation of the Trents. In 1967, Hartmann
interviewed the Trents during his photo analysis for the Condon Committee. He
was impressed by their lack of interest in the sighting, as evidenced by the fact
that Mr. Trent did not even bother to get down from his tractor while Hartmann
was interviewing him. In 1969, Dr. McDonald had several phone conversations
with the Trents and concluded: “I find them to be the kind of people who could
scarcely carry off an imaginative hoax or fabrication” Mr. Trent told McDonald
that Trent’s father had also seen the object, but only after it receded into the
distance. Also in 1969, Veikko Itkonen, a film producer and director, who was
working on a UFO documentary that was shown in Europe, interviewed the
Trents at the scene of the original photos. He stated that “the conclusions of Dr.
Hartmann are very close to the impressions we got” A. Fryer, a former high-
school science teacher at McMinnville, interviewed the Trents in 1976 and
subsequently stated: “No question in my mind that they weren’t trying to hoax
—she never called it a Flying saucer or UFO.”
I had twenty-six phone conversations with Mrs. Trent during the period
1974-77. During this time, she maintained the expected consistency in retelling
the account of the sighting. She has also provided new information in response
to certain questions which she probably had never been asked before, such as
questions about their typical daily activities and the involvement of any
relatives and friends in the aftermath of the sightings. Mrs. Trent has stated that,
some time after the photos were published, a lady who lived within several
miles of the Trent farm in 1950 told Mrs. Trent that she, too, had seen the
strange “parachute-like” object. Mrs. Trent also thinks that Mr. Trent’s mother
might have seen it. Although Mr. Trent’s father was dead by the time of
Hartmann’s interview, the lady who was her neighbor, according to Mrs. Trent,
was still alive (now deceased). It is unfortunate that Hartmann did not ask Mrs.
Trent whether or not she knew of other witnesses. Mrs. Trent has passed two
PSE (psychological stress evaluator) tests of statements she has made
concerning the original sighting and the new information. In the opinion of the
PSE analysts, she shows no noticeable stress when answering any of the
questions regarding the sighting and associated events (e.g., other witnesses,
daily activities, et cetera). Thus, it appears that Hartmann’s official conclusion
is still valid.
—BRUCE MACCABEE
References
Gillmor, Daniel S., ed. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. (Bantam Books, 1969). “Final
Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects” Conducted by the University of
Colorado under contract to the United States Air Force, Dr. Edward U. Condon, Scientific Director.
Klass, Philip J. UFOs Explained (Random House, 1974).
Maccabee, Bruce. “McMinnville (Oregon) photos” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs
Sheaffer, Robert. The UFO Verdict (Prometheus Books, 1981).
Meier contacts (b. 1937) Eduard Meier, popularly known as “Billy,” claims to
have had his first telepathic contacts at the age of five with an elderly
extraterrestrial man who called himself Sfath. Shortly thereafter he physically
met with Sfath on several occasions in the extraterrestrial’s pear-shaped
metallic vehicle, in an area near Meier’s home in northern Switzerland. The
purpose of these contacts was, through the application of advanced
technologies, to accelerate the development of young Meier’s mind to that of an
adult, and prepare him for the mission that would become synonymous with his
life’s purpose.
As a result of this educational process, and ensuing developmental
dissonance with his peers and neighbors, as well as hospitalization for several
years due to tuberculosis, Meier would withdraw from his regular schooling
after nine years.
One of the Pleiadian (or Plejaran) “beamships” with Mount Auruti in the background. Photo by
Eduard “Billy” Meier
Meier’s telepathic contacts with Sfath continued until 1953 and, after their
cessation, were replaced by contacts with an extraterrestrial woman named
Asket who claimed to come from a different adjoining universe, the Dal
universe. Meier emphasizes that these contacts, and all subsequent ones with
various extraterrestrials, were voluntary and not what are commonly called
abductions.
Meier received additional education from Asket, which he claims included
travel back in time to different periods to allow him to see important events as
they actually happened. These experiences, as well as Meier’s own studies of
Earth’s various religions during his extensive travels throughout India and the
Mid-East during the 1960s, further prepared him for his mission.
This photo by Meier shows a beamship with an accompanying remote-controlled craft.
In 1965 Meier lost his left arm in a bus accident in Turkey—an event
foretold by Asket as having to occur. In 1966 he married a Greek woman and
returned to Switzerland with her in 1970, where they began raising their family
of three children.
Five years later, on January 28, 1975, Meier’s contacts began with Semjase,
a female who said that she was from the Pleiades. It was Semjase who would
subsequently provide Meier with the opportunities for the now world famous
photographs and films of UFOs that have been at the center of the controversy
swirling around him.
The remarkable clarity of the hundreds of daytime 35 mm photos, and the
half-dozen pre-video 8mm film segments are unique in all of UFOlogy. Meier
also made cassette tape sound recordings of the UFO’s which could not be
duplicated in sound studios using the best synthesizers available at the time.
Semjase also provided him with metal samples that, upon analysis by Marcel
Vogel, a research chemist with IBM who was a key researcher in the
development of liquid crystal technology and the floppy disk, were determined
to be of such quality and composition as to be unknown and not duplicable by
current scientific methods.
Additionally, the counterclockwise circular landing patterns made in the
grass by the Pleiadian spacecraft, or “beamships” as they are called, remained
in a horizontal position throughout several months with the grass remaining
unbroken, green and healthy. The shear volume and unmatched quality of these
items has, paradoxically, caused some in the UFO field to call the Meier case
too good to be true.
Even more controversial, however, has been the content of the Contact
Notes: the transcripts of the conversations that Meier claims to have had with
Semjase, her father Ptaah and other extraterrestrials, and the Talmud Jmmanuel
(about which more shall be said later.) The Contact Notes cover a very wide
range of topics and are telepathically transmitted to Meier, through an advanced
Pleiadian technology, and then typed by him with his one remaining hand at
very high speed on a typewriter specially modified by the Pleiadians for this
purpose. Unlike a lot of so-called channeled information, the Contact Notes are
unique in that the majority of the material transcribed by Meier is from his
face-to-face encounters with the Pleiadians, which usually occurred on their
beamships. They are not only quite specific but have already been proven to
contain extremely accurate, and previously unpublished, scientific information.
Time will tell how much of the information Meier published on a wide range of
topics is accurate. It has long been accepted by people researching the case that
deliberate disinformation may have been injected by the Pleiadians as a “safety
valve” type of mechanism for skeptics. This viewpoint has in itself generated
some skepticism from critics of the case. Additional areas of information
include:
ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE
During Meier’s 7th recorded contact with Semjase on February 25, 1975, his
34th recorded contact on Septemeber 14, 1975, and 35th contact on September
16, 1975, he was informed of the dangers facing humankind from the
consequences of the human-caused damage to the ozone layer. Semjase
emphasized that the greatest, and at that time unknown to us, damage was
caused by the atmospheric atomic testing of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s
(which released certain “elementary radiations” that our scientists didn’t even
have a means of detecting) as well as from bromine and CFC gases.
Semjase told Meier that the explosions of the atomic devices tore holes in
the ozone allowing deadly UV rays to pass through, killing off microorganisms
in the upper atmosphere as well as microorganisms in the seas, with which they
were in symbiotic relationship. Ultimately this would lead to problems with the
food chain as well as genetic mutations.
An article from the November 29, 1988 Santa Monica, California Evening
Outlook newspaper, titled “Atom Bomb Testing Tied to Nuclear Depletion,”
confirmed Semjase’s conversation with Meier thirteen years earlier. An article
from the February 24, 1992, Los Angeles Times, titled “Ozone Hole Damages
Food Chain,” further confirmed Semjase’s warnings.
During Meier’s 45th contact with Semjase, on February 25, 1976, she also
told him that our extraction of petroleum and natural gas from the Earth, and
damming of waters, was a major contributing factor to the increase of
earthquakes and volcanic activity. A professor at Stanford published a
corroborating article in the June 21 through June 27, 1990, issue of The Good
Life-Independent Journal, a southern California newspaper. A scientific report
aired on National Public Radio in 1991 during which the discovery of the
connection between bromine gases and the ozone damage was “first” revealed.
The report made mention that bromine gases were used extensively in wood
treatment, especially woods prepared for export to Japan, and also for
agricultural applications. Now, decades after Semjase’s warning, bromine gases
are well recognized as damaging to the ozone layer.
Meier published information that he received from the Pleiadians on a wide
range of topics. Time will tell how much of the information is accurate and it
has long been accepted by people researching the case that deliberate
disinformation may have been injected by the Pleiadians as a “safety valve”
type of mechanism for skeptics. This viewpoint has in itself generated some
skepticism from critics of the case. Additional areas of information include the
following:
THE TALMUD JMMANUEL
Central to understanding Meier and his mission is the Talmud Jmmanuel, or

“TJ,” as it is referred to. The TJ was alleged to be an ancient Aramaic
document which was discovered in a long-abandoned half-buried tomb in
Jerusalem, which was initially located by Isa Rashid, a former Greek-Orthodox
priest, in 1963 while under the subconscious prompting of the Pleiadians. The
document itself, sealed in a resin box, was retrieved by Meier, who located the
small obscured opening to the tomb, during a subsequent visit with Rashid. The
surviving translated segment of the TJ is considered by some to be a segment of
the original testament of Jmmanuel (who was later called Jesus), which gave
rise to the New Testament gospels, in particular the Gospel of Matthew. The TJ
is unique in that it answers and resolves more than 300 problems and
inconsistencies that have troubled New Testament scholars for decades
according to James Deardorff, an independent TJ researcher. (For a detailed
exploration of the TJ see Deardorff’s research at
http://www.proaxis.com/~deardorj.)
GENETIC MANIPULATION OF THE SPECIES
The Pleiadians told Meier that many Earth humans are related to them through
common ancient ancestors or to other extraterrestrial visitors from the far distant
past. The case contains quite a bit of specific information about the
extraterrestrial connection as well as why genetic manipulations were
deliberately done, by some ETs, to limit the Earth human’s life span to about 100
years. The Pleiadians claim that the original lengthy life spans of several
hundred years, as referred to in the Bible and other sources, will one day be
reclaimed when scientists discover and rectify the particular genes that were
tampered with. Meier’s writings on this predated the fairly recent published
discoveries in this area. According to Meier, the “original sin” as it is referred to
in the Bible is erroneous, as it really refers to this genetic tampering of the
human DNA that limited the human lifespan.
GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CROPS AND PEOPLE
Meier states that the well-meaning attempts to categorically block the

genetic experimentation and modification of foods and crops are misguided. He
says that it is part of the process of evolution that mankind moves in this
direction, but he also states that vigilance is necessary as there are inevitable
positive and negative results in this area as in all others in life. Perhaps even
more controversial is his prophetic information on the types of genetic
modifications that await the human species. He foresees a time when humans
will also incorporate technological devices into their bodies for a wide range of
functions—a futuristic vision that also portends great difficulties as well as
achievements.
ORGAN TRANSPLANT DANGERS
Years ago, the Pleiadians advised Meier that organ transplantation was a
dangerous practice that would ultimately have to be relinquished in favor of re-
growing and replacing worn or damaged organs. Consideration of this approach
is gaining ground in our scientific circles with rumors that some scientists are
close to perfecting this technology.
FLIGHT TWA 800
In response to Meier’s question as to the cause of the crash of TWA flight

800, Ptaah, Semjase’s father and one of the leaders of the Pleiadians,
unequivocally told Meier that it was an errant U.S. Navy missile.
THE BEAST
Meier has written that the “New World Order” is an inevitable development
in human evolution. Though sure to be initially fraught with very negative
conditions, it is seen as the precursor step to a truly unified, cooperative world.
Regarding the Beast of the Bible, Meier says this actually refers to the super-
computer in Brussels that will ultimately be used to track and control humanity
(that computer reportedly already bears the acronym B.E.A.S.T.)
This control will be accomplished by the implantation of chips, the “mark”
of the Beast, and the use of already existing military satellites, such as were
relied upon in the Gulf War, whose capabilities are far beyond what is publicly
known.
VEGETARIANISM
Meier, claiming to speak on behalf of the Pleiadians, states that

vegetarianism is not healthful for the vast majority of human beings and that it
contributes to faulty thinking due to deficiencies of certain nutrients currently
found only in foods from animal sources. Rather than helping their cause of
protecting animals, those vegetarians opposed to genetic engineering actually
help to perpetuate the unnecessary suffering of countless animals, says Meier.
This is because the answer to the nutritional as well as moral questions lies in
the development of animal proteins “grown” through genetic engineering of
plants; something at least one scientist was exploring several years ago.
FACE ON MARS
What we call the “Face on Mars” is, according to Meier, only the tip of the
artifact-iceberg of what exists, and will be one day found by man, on the now
desolate planet. Meier contends that Mars was one of three planets in the solar
system that have been inhabited by humans. The other planet (besides Mars and
the Earth) was called “Malona” or “Maldek” (its remnants now making up the
asteroid belt). Meier predicts that the discovery of artifacts on Mars will shake
the foundations of our understanding of mankind’s origins.
ABORTION
In his discussions with the Pleiadians, Meier learned that they allow abortion
only up to the third week, as their advanced scientific technology confirms that
the human spirit becomes present with the fetus at this time. Here on Earth,
however, abortion is allowed and in accordance with the spiritual laws and
directives if certain conditions and reasons are present, e.g., genetic defects,
brain damage, danger of the mother’s health, etc. They affirm that terrestrial
science has not yet progressed enough to be able to detect hereditary defects
and other malfunctions in the first three weeks of a pregnancy.
THE LAWS OF CREATION
The Pleiadians say that the universe in which we live is the conscious
embodiment of all that exists, the source of all love, existence, intelligence,
wisdom, knowledge, compassion, mercy, justice, and more. They say that it
permeates all things. Therefore, we must learn to live by its laws and directives.
The “Creation” is that which we may otherwise refer to as “God,” except that it
is of an incomprehensibly greater magnitude, as the term God referred to the
highly advanced extraterrestrial rulers of the distant past who falsely
represented themselves to many peoples in many cultures as the Creation itself.
The Pleiadians state that each human spirit is unique, as it is a small piece—
a tiny hologram—of the full potential of the Creation, which is designed to
unfold and evolve to its full spiritual potential over many millions of
incarnations.
TERRESTRIAL RELIGIONS
With the supremacy of the Creation as the foundation of all spiritual truth,
the Pleiadians and Meier point out that all terrestrial religions miss the mark
and serve to corrupt and retard the development of the human spirit. They are
firm in stating that there are absolutely no gods, deities, saints, ascended
masters, angels, idols, gurus, or other intermediary forms that should stand
between humans and their connection to the Creation. Meier claims that the
original version of the Lord’s Prayer was not directed outward to a “Father in
Heaven” but rather inward to awaken one’s own spirit.
MEIER AND JMMANUEL
It is said that Meier is the current embodiment of the same spirit (or spirit
form) that incarnated as Jmmanuel (erroneously called “Jesus” according to the
Pleiadians and Meier) and Mohammed, as well as several earlier Biblical
prophets and the scientist Galileo, a persecuted “prophet” in his own right. The
Pleiadians and Meier state that he is the prophet of this time—come to do what
the others before him have done—to announce or reintroduce the Laws of
Creation. He is adamant and clear that he is not, and was not, “Jesus Christ.”
Having survived over fifteen assassination attempts, it appears that Meier’s
claims and teachings have contributed to making him at least as much of a
target as the prophets of old.
Research on what is arguably the longest running, and most extensively
researched, UFO contact case was done by Col. Wendell C. Stevens, Lee and
Brit Elders, Tom Welch, Jim Dilettoso, Michael Hesemann, Lou Zinsstag,
Jaime Maussan, Jun-Ichi Yaoi of Nippon TV, and others. The most vocal of
Meier’s critics, Kal K. Korff, allegedly went to Switzerland twice to investigate
the case but returned without interviewing a single eyewitness or even Meier
himself.
Notes: Go to www.figu.ch for more information on the Pleiadians’ and Meier’s

information regarding: AIDS, space travel, destiny of the human races,
intermarriage, polygamy, physics, black holes, spiritual teachings, the New
World Order, religions, ice ages, etc. Of special interest is the “251st contact”
which contains far-reaching prophecies and predictions.
The Pleiadians are now correctly referred to as “Plejarans.” The term
“Pleiadian” was deliberately used by the Plejarans and Meier to distinguish
themselves, at the appropriate time, from all other alleged contactees, channels
and mediums who would claim to be in some form of communication with
“Pleiadians.” The Plejarans confirm that the star system of the Pleiades, as is
visible to us on Earth, is too young and not possessing the conditions suitable
for any form of inhabitation. Thus, there are not, and never have been, any
“Pleiadians” providing any information to anyone in any form.
—MICHAEL HORN
Menger, Howard (b. 1922). Howard Menger is the best-known contactee in

the eastern United States, and the first to claim he was a “child contactee.”
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Menger moved to New Jersey, where he
received his elementary and high school education. Upon graduation from high
school, he worked for a year in Picatinny Arsenal as a munitions handler and
inspector. In 1942, Menger enlisted in the U. S. Army, where he was assigned
to the Armored Tank Division. He later worked with Army Intelligence and on
detached service with Naval Intelligence and Chemical Warfare.
Howard Menger
A “Venusian Scout Ship” photographed in 1953 by Howard Menger
After his discharge from the Army in 1946, he established the Menger
Advertising Company in Washington and Highbridge, New Jersey, where he
was in business for twenty years. He formed his own company, Energy Systems
Research, Inc., to do basic research in electronics and to promote several of his
inventions, including an emergency power pack.
In 1956, Menger took some photographs of “flying saucers” in a field near
his home. The story and events which surrounded those photographs resulted in
several cross-country lecture tours and his book From Outer Space to You
(1959). With his wife, Connie (who helped him compile the first book and a
second, entitled The Carpenter Returns, coauthored with her and Milton
Selleck), he currently owns and operates his own advertising sign company and
art studio in Vero Beach, Florida.
845 28th Ave.

Vero Beach, FL 32960
Address:
U.S.A.
The Space People who contacted Howard Menger originated on Venus,

Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn and were making contact for the first time with a
select group of earthlings. Some of the earthlings had a very special heritage
unbeknownst to them until after their meetings with the Space People. Mr.
Menger himself, for example, and his second wife, Connie, were reincarnated
from previous lives on the planet Venus. Venus, by the way, is described by
Menger as “…young and healthy, with beautiful foliage, streams, forests, large
bodies of water, mountains, hills…” and not unlike “…some places in
California today….”
Menger claims the earliest contact experience of all the contactees. It began
when he was only ten years old, in 1932, while he was playing in the woods
near his home. He came upon a beautiful golden-haired woman, sitting on a
rock. Menger later wrote, [she] “was the most exquisite woman my young eyes
had ever beheld! The warm sunlight caught the highlights of her long golden
hair as it cascaded around her face and shoulders. The curves of her lovely
body were delicately contoured-revealed through the translucent material of
[her] clothing....”
The woman said: “Howard, I have come a long way see you…and talk with
you.” She told him: “We are contacting our own.” She explained that when he
grew older, he would be contacted again; i.e., when he could understand their
teachings, which would include the knowledge of his purpose on Earth and
what would be expected of him as a messenger of the Space People.
“Spacewoman” captured on film by Howard Menger
Indeed, there were other meetings with the Space People, a long series of
contacts which included a course of instruction that continued over many years
and amounted to a complete guide to good, clean living. Spiritual subjects were
taught, such as the proper care of the soul, but also there were teachings about
the proper care of the body. Special health foods were extremely important.
When the Space People visited Earth, but neglected to bring along their own
food, “They asked mainly for frozen fruit juices, canned fruit and vegetables,
whole wheat bread, wheat germ, and the like.” One specimen of food processed
by the Space People, a Lunar potato, was given to a laboratory in Philadelphia
for analysis. It was reportedly found to have five times more protein than
potatoes grown here on Earth.
—RONALD D. STORY
Menzel, Donald H. (1901-1976). Regarded as the leading “debunker” of UFOs

for almost twenty-five years, Donald Menzel, a well-known astronomer, was
the author of three books and numerous articles which attempted to explain
UFO phenomena as a combination of natural and man-made events. He
perceived the sky as containing a myriad of possible UFOs: planets, stars,
meteors, aircraft, balloons, etc., all waiting to be misidentified by the credulous
observer or, in some instances, by the well-trained observer.
While some found his explanations convincing, others did not. Most UFO
advocates considered him an “archenemy.” Many of his explanations were, in
fact, reasonable, and Menzel certainly had the technical background to evaluate
such data. However, he rarely conducted personal field checks and limited
himself to more theoretical explanations, which, however unlikely, he
considered more probable than extraterrestrial visitation. He accepted the
probability of many technologically advanced civilizations throughout the
galaxy, but not that they could easily, and routinely, travel across interstellar
distances to Earth.
Menzel had a certain impatience with those who entertained the
extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), as well as with those who were not altogether
convinced by his explanations of UFO reports. He was also critical of the U. S.
Air Force UFO investigators, whom he felt often ignored his evaluations and
his advice, particularly during the early 1950s.
After obtaining a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University in 1924,
Menzel taught astronomy at the University of Iowa (1924-25) and Ohio State
University (1925-26). and worked at the Lick Observatory of the University of
California (1926-32). He then joined the faculty at Harvard University as an
assistant professor of astronomy (1932-35), later becoming associate (1935-38)
and full professor (1938-71) of astrophysics, and Paine Professor of Practical
Astronomy (1956-71). He served as head of the astronomy department (1946-
49), and associate director (1946-54), acting director (1952-54), and director
(1954-66) of the Harvard College Observatory. He became a professor emeritus
in 1971, and so remained until his death in late 1976. He was also affiliated
with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (1966-71).
Menzel was a member of many scientific societies, was president of the
American Astronomical Society (1954-56), and was the recipient of many
distinguished awards. He was a consultant to numerous industrial firms and
federal agencies. During World War II, he served as chairman of the Radio
Propagation Committee of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff, which
worked on critical communications and radar problems, and headed the Section
of Mathematical and Physical Research of U.S. Naval Communications.
His principal research activities involved solar and stellar astronomy,
planetary atmospheres, wave mechanics and atomic spectra, radio propagation,
and sunionosphere problems. Major UFO works: Flying Saucers (1953); The
World of Flying Saucers, with Lyle Boyd (1964); and The UFO Enigma: A
Definitive Explanation of the UFO Phenomenon, with Ernest Taves (1977).
POSITION STATEMENT: Man has traditionally tended to construct a myth to

explain anything he cannot understand. And this is precisely the way the flying
saucers, or UFOs, came into existence. I became actively involved with UFOs in
1952. Look [magazine] called me to ask if I had any ideas on the subject. I did
and wrote two articles for them which I later expanded into a book.
In the summer of 1952, while on a tour of active duty with the Navy, I
addressed a large and enthusiastic group of officers at the Pentagon concerning
my views of UFOs. I was also invited to brief the personnel of Project Blue
Book. I found them much less receptive. A few were positively antagonistic,
especially those who, as I later found out, had become convinced of the
extraterrestrial hypothesis, or ETH. However, I made a few converts to my
views, individuals who later came to reorganize the project completely, about
1954.
I predict a decline of public interest in UFOs. The people seem to have taken
up a new cause: Astrology. It has a similar scientific basis and fulfills a similar
need in human desire. The government should withdraw all support for UFO
studies as such, though I could advocate the support of research in certain
atmospheric phenomena associated with UFO reports. I further predict that
scientists of the twenty-first century will look back on UFOs as the greatest
nonsense of the twentieth century.
In conclusion, I want to point out that, in my opinion, the question of
whether planets of our solar system or elsewhere have intelligent life on them is
irrelevant. Nor am I denying the possibility that someday we may actually
experience visits from outer space. My point is that the UFO reports to date do
not represent extraterrestrial activity in any form. I confidently predict that no
amount of investigation will bring evidence in support of the extraterrestrial
hypothesis.
—ETEP STAFF
(Position statement was abstracted and adapted from “UFOs—The Modem

Myth” by Donald Menzel, in Sagan, Carl and Page, Thornton, eds., UFOs—A
Scientific Debate, 1972.)
Messages from the Stars (Harper & Row, 1978). British science writer Ian
Ridpath proposes that humankind may never meet extraterrestrials because the
acquisition of higher intelligence diminishes curiosity about space exploration.
After dismissing UFO sightings and ancient astronaut evidence as based on
fanatical belief, not evidence, he wonders whether or not we might be the first
technological civilization in the universe to survive.
Messengers of Deception (And/Or Press, 1979). Jacques Vallée speculates

that contactees may be unwitting victims of cult groups pursuing a hidden
social and political agenda. He began to develop this conspiracy theory after
computers used to search for patterns in the global distribution of UFO reports
portrayed the behavior of the phenomenon as if it were a conditioning process
using “absurdity and confusion to achieve its goal while hiding its mechanism.”
Metán (Argentina) UFO crash-retrieval The controversial events that took

place at Metán, a small town near Salta, Argentina, fit in well with the UFO
crash/retrieval obsession that prevailed in the early and mid-90s. Between
August 17-18, 1995, thousands of people allegedly witnessed the collision of
an unidentified flying object against the slopes of 9000-ft. El Crestón after
having supposedly been struck by air-to-air missiles. A small private plane
flying over the crash site hours later was knocked out of the sky by alleged
“electromagnetic interference” emanating from the wreckage.
Details tacked onto the story—such as the six-hundred-foot diameter of the
downed saucer and its 200 dead occupants—hampered its credibility when the
news was first circulated. But clearly verifiable ground effects, including
uprooted trees and deep furrows in the landscape, coupled with the fact that
seismometers 90 miles away from the source were set in motion after the
impact, were clear indicators that something had indeed occurred. A rescue
team led by Pedro Olivera saw a metallic object at the epicenter of the
devastation and advised their superiors of the fact. The rescuers were curtly
told to advance no further and return to their headquarters.
On August 18, 1995, local resdents saw English-speaking personnel heading
toward the Metán crash site. The foreigners removed pieces of a slender,
metallic material resembling aluminum from the crash site, which allegedly
“assumed a concave shape when joined.”
Raúl Córdoba, a Salta journalist interviewed by Buenos Aires' Crónica
newspaper on September 1, 1995 stated that “there is no doubt that we have
NASA personnel here trying to conceal the truth, assisted by members of the
National University at Salta, since it is already involved in the matter but
refuses to publicize its involvement.”
—SCOTT CORRALES
metaphysical aspects of UFOs and ETs With every passing year, the
study of UFOlogy grows more complex, as UFO sightings and ET
(extraterrestrial) contacts continue to occur across the world. We are faced with
an enormous body of research at our disposal—well documented and
extensively studied. Facing the dawn of the 21st century, we have no problem
finding data to support the claim of true extraterrestrial visitation. Our problem
is how to interpret and make sense of all this data.
As we seek to uncover the deeper levels of meaning, we have to realize that
empirical methods, for all their merits, have built-in limitations. Put simply, the
scientific approach of most UFOlogists and SETI scientists gives us but a piece
of the puzzle. While it does provide ample documentation of isolated events
and experiences, it is completely unable to address the larger dynamics.
UFOlogists have little to say about the metaphysics of such visitors from
beyond.
However, there are other sources of information to consult. As documented
by Richard Thompson in his book, Alien Identities (1993,) many aspects of
modem UFO/ET phenomena were well understood by the ancient Hindu
priests, and were extensively documented in the Vedic scriptures. We find
comparable material in the texts of almost all world religions, including the
Judeo-Christian and Native American traditions, such as the Mayan and Hopi.
There is also a huge body of material in Western esoteric schools, including
Theosophy, as well as coming from more modem “ET channels.” All of these
sources offer a wealth of information on cosmic life and its relation to Earth,
and when wisely used, can help us fill in the gaps left by empirical UFO
research.
Admittedly, the reliability of these sources varies, they offer no proof of
their claims, and being based on subjective, non-empirical methods, they do
often suffer from exaggeration and mythologizing. Nonetheless, they do give us
important perspectives, which, in some cases, can help us interpret and
integrate the disparate facts emerging from UFO investigation. It is arrogant
and naïve for UFOlogy to dismiss all such sources, because of the distortions of
some. This writer believes it is prudent to take a careful look.
For instance, we can find numerous references to extraterrestrial life in
Buddhist texts, spanning a period of more than 2500 years from the time of the
historical Buddha. In particular, they document the polarized intentions of two
main groups of beings. These groups are placed in the traditional Buddhist
cosmology of the “six realms,” and in Sanskrit, are termed devas (“radiant
gods”) and asuras (“angry, jealous, or fighting gods”). The idea of benevolent
spiritual beings who support humanity, and evil beings who do harm, can be
found in all mystic traditions, and is highly applicable to understanding ET
agendas.
We also find numerous references to interplanetary evolution in the writings
of Alice Bailey, an exponent of Theosophy. It is well understood that souls live
on different worlds, divided according to their age and level of development,
and that there are cosmic bodies that govern their growth and interaction. We
even find commentary on the relationship between Earth and other star
systems, such as that of Sirius and the Pleiades. Interestingly, these stars figure
highly in the mythology of the Maya, Sumerians, and Dogon of Africa, and
many contactees claim to have met ETs from these systems. Obviously, the
ancients knew some things about cosmic life that modern UFOlogy is only
reaffirming.
Finally, we can even find useful data amidst the popular books that claim to
be channeled from ET groups, despite the obvious folly of some. In my own
comparative research, one such source stands out as most credible and accurate.
Consisting of four main volumes, The Law of One series (also called The RA
Material) speaks extensively about the metaphysics of UFOs and ET contact.
Most importantly, they explain just why these visitors are now coming to Earth.
According to this source, which claims to have also contacted the Egyptian
Pharaoh Akhnaton, we art nearing the end of a major cycle of human evolution.
They say that ET groups are well aware of this fact, and knowing that time is
short before drastic changes occur in our dimension, they seek to influence us
towards a more conscious choice of our own destiny. Not surprisingly, many
ET experiencers also bring the same kind of message. They say that UFO
visitation is basically a global spiritual wake-up call.
Admittedly, we have much to learn about the metaphysics of UFOs and
cosmic life, and we should take a careful approach to our study and data
collection. Nevertheless, facing such a complex, abstruse topic, it is essential
we broaden our perspective, and consider alternative sources of information,
outside the realm of empirical investigation. The UFO phenomenon need not
remain a mystery, and the big picture can be known, but we will need courage,
discernment, and an open mind to find the answers.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
References
Bailey, A. A. A Treatise on Cosmic Fire (Lucis, 1925).
Elkins, D., C. Rueckert and J. McCarty. The Law of One, vol.II (L/L Research, 1982).
______. The Law of One, vol.III (L/L Research, 1982).
______. The Law of One, vol.IV (L/L Research, 1983).
______. The RA Material (L/L Research, 1984).
Mandelker, Scott. From Elsewhere: Being E.T. in America (Birch Lane Press, 1995).
Thompson, Richard L. Alien Identities (Govardhan Hill, 1993).
Mexican UFO wave of the 1990s During the first half of the decade, Mexico
produced a wealth of tantalizing, crystal-clear video and photographic images
of unidentified flying objects. Interaction between U.S. and Mexican
researchers reached an all-time high as vast quantities of information were
disseminated throughout the world. The lion’s share of the attention was
commanded by the aerial display over Mexico City on September 16, 1991, but
cases had been coming in from all over the Mexican Republic since the second
quarter of 1991, with numerous sightings being reported in the states of Sonora,
Sinaloa, San Luis Potosí, Michoacán, and Puebla.
In April 1991, Adriana Velázquez and her brothers witnessed two
“midgets”—1.20 meters tall—who signalled to them with a powerful red light
near Tepejí del Río, following the sighting of a “fireball.” In May 1991, in the
state of Hidalgo (northeast of Mexico City), three elongated silvery vehicles
appeared over the town of Huejutla, and a small UFO was seen to fire a beam
of red light over the village of Real del Monte with no apparent damage caused.
On May 29, 1991, hundreds of witnesses were treated to the sight of a
nocturnal “parade” of twelve shining, elongated objects over the city of
Pachuca, Hidalgo—an incident which would repeat itself a few days later,
when approximately 15 triangular lights (resembling the ones seen frequently
in Belgium during 1990) were reported over the same location.
The city of Jojutla, Puebla was rocked by an unexplained explosion on May
11, 1991, in which a blinding light was followed a massive detonation, deeper
and more resonant than even the loudest thunderclap which rattled windows
and shook homes down to their foundations. The unusual light disappeared
seconds after the loud report. Professor José Luis Martínez, a mathematician
and physicist, indicated that “either a bona fide UFO or a meteorite” could have
been responsible for the extraordinary event, but added that he was “more
inclined to believe in the first” alternative—the UFO explanation—since
meteorites do not explode noisily in mid-flight.
On January 2, 1992, a blackout plunged 22 municipalities in the states of
Guerrero and Morelos, as well as the cities of Iguala and Taxco (a well-known
tourist destination) into absolute darkness. Witnesses were startled to see three
unusual objects which appeared to be equipped with “spotlights” scanning the
ground.
By April 1993, the UFOlogical action had shifted even further north to
Ciudad Valle (San Luis Potosí) and its surrounding communities: on the 22nd,
hundreds of eyewitnesses saw the nocturnal antics of luminous vehicles
performing aerial somersaults for well over an hour. Four disk-shaped vehicles,
escorted by a larger “mothership,” cavorted with impunity over the countryside.
A similar event took place on April 26 and 27, but this time the intruders
were accompanied by unknown, mysterious “airplanes” (reminiscent of the
“ghost flyers” reported over Scandinavia in the 1940s) that flew lower than the
UFOs themselves before thousands of startled onlookers. Circles of crushed
and burnt vegetation were found in Chantol, a community close to Valles, and
in the vicinity of the Tanchipa Mountains.
Yet the Mexican saucer wave was also characterized by a number of
surprising encounters with non-human entities: in May 1994, a humanoid alien
creature was reported in the town of Cosolapa, Oaxaca. Witness Joaquina
Reyes described the alleged UFOnaut as an entity the size of a ten-year-old boy
“...all in white, with a crown and belt that changed color constantly.”
The wave was also characterized by crash/retrieval incidents, such as the
one involving the Mexican Army’s 5th Cavalry Regiment in the alleged
collision of an artifact on April 30, 1994 in the region known as Arroyo de los
Gatos (San Luis Potosí).
UFO activity over Mexico would continue well into the decade, but without
the intensity that had characterized its initial years. The credibility of many
incidents captured on videotape was called into question by their commercial
exploitation and the famous “Las Lomas UFO hoax” of 1997, which portrayed
a wobbly saucer disappearing behind a high-rise condominium in a
neighborhood of Mexico City.
—SCOTT CORRALES
Michel, Aimé (1919-1992). Aimé Michel was a French mathematician and

engineer, well known in UFO circles for his theory called orthoteny. that UFO
sightings occurring on the same day are often arranged along a straight line.
Michel retired in 1975 and has devoted himself to “reading and study in several
scientific areas.” He also serves as an overseas consultant to the British Flying
Saucer Review.
Aimé Michel
Michel attended the universities of Aix, Grenoble, and Marseilles (1939-43),

where he studied the theory of sound, musical harmony, and various
instruments. He earned his License (similar to the master’s degree) in
philosophy and letters. He worked at the Short-Wave Service of National Radio
Broadcasting (1944-58) and with the Research Service of the French Radio-
Television Office (1958-75). He has been a writer specializing in the topic of
animal communication from 1954 to 1965, during which time he published
several articles. Michel has also studied communication in the mystical
community.
In UFOlogy, his involvement dates from the postwar Scandinavian ghost
rocket wave. His two books, The Truth About Flying Saucers (1954) and Flying
Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery (1958), have been very influential
among students of the UFO phenomenon, both in Europe and the United States.
POSITION STATEMENT: I do not think that one can capture the essentials of
UFOlogy in a brief article. In effect, thinking about UFOs requires a
reconstitution of the mind more drastic than the Copernican Revolution. The
most sensible approach is through astrophysics. The two basic facts to keep in
mind are these: (1) the great number of stars with planets, and (2) the age of
these stars, billions of which are billions of years older than the sun.
If the attainment of the level of psychological complexity of human beings
is a normal, nonmiraculous phenomenon, then one must admit the existence of
a “cosmic psychic milieu,” which would have surpassed the human level of
complexity some millions of years ago. This “milieu” can be presumed to be
present everywhere in one or more unknown forms and probably exceeds our
own level of complexity as much as ours exceeds that of the lower animals. It is
not a question of a “club of advanced civilizations”; this is an anthropomorphic
idea which supposes that the human level is the final one in the evolution of
every intelligent species, and that after it it reached, the species can evolve its
culture but not itself. It is the last and the most naive of the pre-Copernican
superstitions.
It would take a long and very difficult effort of reflection to imagine the
rational means for studying even the aspects accessible to us of a psychic
milieu so far superior without falling into superstition. It is up to astronomers,
biologists, specialists in evolution, epistemologists, and other philosophers to
tell us whether the observed phenomena of UFOs corresponds to the
predictions one could make about the behavior of such a psychic milieu. To my
thought, based on premises too complicated to explain here, UFOs are a
manifestation of this milieu, present, through some unknown manner, since the
origin of the solar system. I think that it would be a great mystery if something
like UFOs did not exist; since this would contradict everything we know about
astrophysics, biology, et cetera. For the existence of UFOs in all their
unfathomable strangeness conforms to what science would lead us to expect.
The short amount of time in which Western science has existed (a few
centuries) is a very brief passage in the process of cosmic evolution. The Earth
itself, which twentieth-century man sees is a transient phenomenon, and thus at
any instant a very rare one. We are perhaps the only beings at a “human” level
throughout the galaxy. What action (if any) does the cosmic psychic milieu
exercise on this brief passage? Are we treated in a special manner? Is this
passage through the human stage something cosmically precious (similar, for
example, to infancy for human beings)? Is the lack of open contact the proof
that we are something rare and precious? I think it is, but I will not attempt to
demonstrate it here.
One means of measuring the effects of this action on us is constant
surveillance of the global UFO experience through opinion polls. There are
more direct methods, but they remain to be invented.
In my opinion, the noncontact phase will last until we ourselves discover the
method of contact. To discover the method will require a profound
transformation of mankind. It is not certain that we will find it. It is not even
certain that our evolution has not already missed the path that would lead to
contact (good or bad). Nonetheless, my opinion is that the scientific path is the
right way; but it is long and dangerous, and the contact may have good or bad
results.
At present, UFOlogy is not yet a science. To my thinking, it will not become
a science unless there is a change of paradigm in the classical sciences think
that the new physics is in the process of discovering the new paradigm by
introducing the phenomenon of consciousness in its theories. I also feel that the
phenomenon of consciousness will take an expanding role in the new physics,
perhaps as far as becoming the sole object of science. It is thus, I believe, that
humanity, transformed by itself, will enter the cosmic psychic milieu.
—AIMÉ MICHEL
Michalak encounter Stefan Michalak of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada,

claimed to have suffered first- and second-degree burns, severe nausea, loss of
weight, and other apparent symptoms of radiation sickness after a close
encounter with a landed UFO, about eighty miles east of Winnipeg, on the
afternoon of May 20, 1967. Michalak, age fifty-one at the time, was employed
as a mechanic at the Inland Cement Company and enjoyed amateur prospecting
as a hobby. One weekend, he set out alone to look for minerals in the wooded
and rocky terrain near Falcon Lake. While examining a quartz vein, he said, he
became aware of the sound of some cackling geese, apparently alarmed by
something. Looking up, he reportedly observed two oval-shaped UFOs,
glowing scarlet-red that were descending rapidly. While one of the objects
came to rest on a rock about 160 feet away, the other one hovered about fifteen
feet above the ground for a few minutes and then took off at high speed.
Michalak waited and watched for about thirty minutes, he said, while the
“machine” that landed just sat there, “radiating heat,” and “changing in color,
turning from red to gray-red to light gray and then to the color of hot stainless
steel, with a golden glow around it.” Then, a door (square but rounded at the
corners) opened, from which a brilliant purple light emanated. He also reported
“wafts of warm air that seemed to come out in waves from the craft,
accompanied by [a] pungent odor of sulfur. I heard a soft murmur, like the
whirl of a tiny electric motor running very fast.” As he approached within sixty
feet of the “craft,” he claimed, he heard voices coming from inside. “They
sounded like humans,” he said, and “I was able to make out two distinct voices,
one with a higher pitch than the other.” He attempted to communicate by
shouting in English, Russian, German, Italian, French, and Ukrainian but got no
response.
Michalak then approached within touching distance of the object and
decided to take a look inside. He said, “Placing green lenses over my goggles
[carried with him on prospecting trips to protect his eyes from rock chips], I
stuck my head inside the opening. The inside was a maze of lights. Direct
beams running in horizontal and diagonal paths and a series of flashing lights, it
seemed to me, were working in a random fashion, with no particular order or
sequence.” He then took a closer look at the surface of the craft, which he said
had no rivets or seams of any kind. just then, the object tilted slightly, and
Michalak felt a scorching pain around his chest. As he touched the machine, his
rubber-coated glove melted and his shirt suddenly caught fire. As he tore off his
shirt and tossed it to the ground, the ship lifted off and, with a sudden rush of
air, disappeared into the sky.
Confused and frightened, Michalak headed back toward the highway to seek
medical help. He was subsequently treated at Misericordia Hospital for chest
bums and released. He reported the incident to the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police (RCMP), but they initially expressed no interest in the case. Eventually,
the incident came to the attention of the press, radio, and television media, and
various authorities. Many UFO investigators, including Dr. Roy Craig of the
University of Colorado UFO Project, checked into the matter.
Probably the most significant aspect of the case was the prolonged period of
illness endured by the witness. For weeks, Michalak could not keep food in his
stomach and suffered from nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, a drop in his
lymphocyte count, and a weight loss of twenty-two pounds. A curious
characteristic of the burns on his chest was their arrangement, which was in a
checkerboard pattern. Michalak’s health gradually returned to normal, but not
without several recurring episodes.
On June 10th, three weeks following the UFO incident, he experienced a
number of blisters high on his chest and a V-shaped rash that ran from the
middle of his chest to his ears. Michalak consulted a radiologist and a skin
specialist, who treated him for the condition. Then, on September 21st, five
months after the UFO encounter, he reported a burning sensation around the
neck and chest, followed by a recurrence of several large red spots in the same
places where the burns had been. He also had swelling in his hands and chest,
accompanied by dizziness, which prompted his readmittance to Misericordia
Hospital for observation. He was released the following day.
After several unsuccessful attempts in the company of representatives from
the RCAF (Royal Canadian Air Force), RCMP, and Dr. Craig, Michalak
allegedly found the UFO-landing site, with the help of Mr. G. A. Hart, an
electronics engineer of Winnipeg, who happened to be interested in the case. In
the words of Michalak: “Our greatest surprise was to see very plainly the
outline of the ship on the ground where it had landed six weeks earlier.
“We found the remains of my shirt at the scene along with the tape measure
I lost that day. We placed the articles in plastic bags, gathered some samples of
rock and earth from the area, and took some pictures of the spot. We also
discovered that branches of trees in the area where the craft came down had
withered away and died, while all around the trees were flourishing normally.”
It is said that the soil samples collected were tested by various authorities,
but again, as is usual in UFO matters, nothing was ever proven.
Mr. Michalak died, at the age of 83, in October of 1999. And his encounter
has remained one of the most puzzling UFO cases on record.
—RONALD D. STORY
mind control by aliens The idea that the mind can be controlled or
influenced by some form of advanced technology wielded by aliens or secretive
people in possession of special knowledge is more pervasive than most people
realize. The thought that free will can be subverted and man is a mere puppet to
higher powers in the universe has fascinated thinkers throughout history.
Supernatural beliefs, most notably demonic possession and the casting of
spells, often invoke the premise that the mind may be powerless against control
by forces external to the human soul.
Arthur Koestler affirms that the dramatic motif of volition against fate is one
of the most powerful archetypes in literature and has appeared in countless
forms. Threats to individual or collective freedom arouses very primal human
fears and can yield a drama of intense emotions when free will is affirmed.
Conversely, when free will is denied, the effect is coldly distancing and allows
contemplation of humans as blameless innocents caught in a web of impersonal
forces. Because you cannot have heroes without a powerful adversary, paranoia
is virtually de rigueur in great literature. (Thorpe, 1980) Extraterrestrials are
one of the more recent additions to the pantheon of gods, demons, superior
races, secret societies, and power elites that have been pulling the strings for
ages.
EARLY HISTORY
Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Horla” (1885) may be the first work
of fiction to incorporate the general notion. A gentleman tormented by fears
and possible hallucinations speculates that thinkers from a distant world may
traverse space to conquer as the Norsemen crossed seas to subjugate feebler
nations. “We are so weak, so powerless, so ignorant, so small—we who live on
this particle of mud which revolves in liquid air.” He realizes that Mesmer’s
experiments in suggestion, ten years earlier, were the first look at a new
weapon of this new Lord, the Horla. Enslaving the human soul, he would make
of humanity what we made of horses and oxen. “His slave and His food, by the
mere power of his will. Woe to us!” As the story proceeds, the realization
strengthens that the Horla has taken hold of the gentleman. “It is He, the Horla
who haunts me, and who makes me think of these foolish things! He is within
me, He is becoming my soul.” He tries to combat it, and in horror realizes there
is only one escape.
The story, tragically, reflects a worsening mental state of the author.
Maupassant’s body was failing and he took drugs. He started to have
hallucinations, then delusions of persecution, and eventually made attempts at
suicide. He was committed to an asylum where he died in 1893. (Commin, n.d.)
H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) speaks of a race called the
Great Old Ones which came from the stars and spoke to men by “molding their
dreams.” The emergence of Cthulhu from beneath the seas is accompanied by
sensitive individuals going mad. The cult that sought to liberate him warned he
would bring Earth beneath his sway. (Lovecraft, 1978)
Lovecraft’s use of the motif is more philosophical and consciously guided
by a mechanistic supernatural vision of the cosmos as totally indifferent to the
wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, pterodactyls, fungi, men, trees, or
other forms of biological energy. As he wrote in a letter a year before this story:
“To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or
dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love
and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called
mankind, have any existence at all.” It has been said that Lovecraft was the first
sciencefiction writer to cultivate this stark aesthetic in the service of horror.
(Joshi, 1980) The idea has obvious roots in the metaphor of deep time advanced
by Charles Lyell and other geologists in the prior century. (Gould, 1987)
Lovecraft’s aesthetic led to a proliferation of amoral aliens in subsequent
decades.
THE SF CONNECTION
C.L. Moore’s “Shambleau” (1933) reinvents the Medusa as a feline alien

with terribly hypnotic eyes able to control the mind and soul as it drains the life
force of its victim. The victim enjoys both horror and pleasure as he knows
horrible wild things and visits unbelievable places while entwined in her ropy
embrace. “Black Thirst” (1934) revisits the idea with an alien able to steal a
soul through the eyes and sink the victim into a waking nightmare. (Del Rey,
1975) Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Valley of Dreams” (1934) has Tweel, an ostrich-
like Martian, try to prevent Earthmen from entering a valley that looks like
paradise. It soon transpires it is a telepathic illusion generated by dream-beasts,
blobby plants with writhing rope tentacles to lure animals in to feed on them.
(Weinbaum, 1974)
H.G. Wells wrote a couple of works involving the idea of extraterrestrial
influences in 1937. The Camford Visitation has a vicar use a case of a person
troubled by a disembodied voice in a book he is writing called Extra-Terrestrial
Disturbances of Human Mentality. The case is said to demonstrate an “upthrust
of the subconscious through some sort of space-time dislocation.” (Slusser and
Rabkin, 1987) Better known is Star-Begotten: A Biological Fantasia. It tells the
tale of a man discovering a generation of humans who are more elevated than
prior generations. They possess unaccountable intuitions, mathematical gifts,
strange memories and exceptional abilities. He becomes enamored with the
idea that aliens of higher development are manipulating cosmic energies and
firing away at human chromosomes with increasing accuracy and effectiveness
through the ages. The Martians were acting as a sort of interplanetary tutor
unlike the invaders of War of the Worlds. The book affects an ambiguity over
whether the narrator was deluding himself with pseudoscientific nonsense or
making an actual discovery. At the conclusion, the narrator realizes with a start
that he himself was one of the “strangers and innovators to our fantastic planet
who were crowding into life and making it over anew.” (Wells, 1970)
The pulp writer Raymond Z. Gallun utilized the extraterrestrial influence
motif in several stories. “The Magician of Dream Valley” (1938) and “The
Lotus-Engine” (1940) develop the idea of aliens able to generate radiations that
totally envelop humans in a hallucinatory reality. In “Godson of Almarlu”
(1936) a machine was devised that was said to now and again influence
terrestrial life. “Hotel Cosmos” (1938) revolves around a globe that sends out
invisible radiations of madness that affects the nervous tissue and is used to
sabotage a Galactic Conference.
Arthur C. Clarke used the motif in two widely acclaimed works. In
Childhood’s End (1953) an Overmind “attempted to act directly upon the minds
of races and to influence their development.” It failed with prior worlds, but
Earth’s youths are successfully adapted to alien consciousness and the reader
experiences them leaving the cradle of the Earth as they evolve towards the
Overmind.
Even better known, if less understood, is the film 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). The monolith of an alien culture appears before a tribe of apes and
invests a new awareness within them that sets human evolution on the course of
cosmic ambitions. As originally conceived, the alien artifact was to create an
hypnotic teaching effect. In the film it is wisely rendered as a mystical moment
of McLuhanesque enlightenment as the ape that touched the monolith realized
the extension of power capable with a tool. A bone becomes a weapon for
hunting and murder and this leads inexorably towards atom bombs and space
travel. (Agel, 1970)
Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (1959) is another acclaimed work that
uses the device for particularly enjoyable distancing purposes. Humankind was
caused to evolve solely to create and transport a tiny repair part for an alien
vessel stranded on the Saturnian moon of Titan. The aliens, called
Tralfamadorians, sent messages to the stranded aliens by having humans
unconsciously form them. Here is how the process is explained:
“Tralfamadorians were able to make certain impulses from the Universal Will
to Become echo through the vaulted architecture of the universe with about
three times the speed of light. And able to focus and modulate these impulses
so as to influence creatures far, far away and inspire them to serve
Tralfamodorian ends.” Civilizations bloomed and crumbled as humans built
tremendous structures to relay messages to Titan. The meaning of Stonehenge
in Tralfamadorian, when viewed from above, is: “Replacement part being
rushed with all possible speed.” (Vonnegut, 1959)
Also notable, particularly in the light of interviews where the author claims
the book is based in part on his real-life mystical experiences, is Philip K.
Dick’s Valis (1983). (Platt, 1980) The title refers to an influencing machine
from the star system of Sirius. The protagonist explains its operation by saying,
“Sites of his brain were being selectively stimulated by tight energy beams
from far off, perhaps millions of miles away.” The narrator is convinced of the
insanity of the idea of Valis and is struck by the oddity of “a lunatic discounting
his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; [the protagonist] had
intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its
sights and sounds.” The belief that information-rich beams of energy focused
on his head allowed him to recognize his hallucinations as hallucinations.
“But…he now had a ‘they’.” Not much of an improvement, in the opinion of
the narrator. (Dick, 1981)
Movies involving the motif of alien influence are common. Dramatically,
the best was probably Five Million Miles to Earth of the Quatermass series. It
is discovered that insectoid Martians once psychically enslaved humanity at the
dawn of history. A buried spaceship with dead Martians is dug up, but the
spaceship comes alive and starts to take control of humanity once more.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) is also revered by critics for its rich
metaphor of the pod people. Technically, this is better as an example of the
Capgras syndrome form of paranoia, but it is understandably lumped in with
the pandemic of alien possession in fifties cinema: Invaders from Mars, It
Came from Outer space, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Kronos, Beast With a
Million Eyes, Enemy from Space, and so on.
Control by implant is found in Invaders from Mars, where the operation to
insert it is utilized as a dramatic peril. It recurs in Battle in Outer Space, but
here a strobing beam of light does the operation as the victim drives a car. After
the radio control apparatus makes him a slave to the glorious planet Nehtal, he
experiences a time loss and discovers a trickle of blood on his forehead. In
Catwomen of the Moon a beam of light is alone the force of influence. In Earth
vs. the Flying Saucers another beam of light makes the skull of a victim
transparent while knowledge is sucked out. A cruder form of mindscan
involving a TV monitor can be found in Invasion of the Star Creatures, a lame
comedy. Zontar—The Thing from Venus offers an amusing variant by some
very unconvincing ‘injecto-pods,’ vampire-bats with lobster tails that gain
control when they bite you in the neck.
TV MIND CONTROL
Television probably regards alien influence as a staple item. Star Trek, Lost
in Space, The Invaders, The Outer Limits, Space 1999, Dr. Who all immediately
spring to mind with episodes. It has prompted caricature such as a Dick van
Dyke show in which Zombies from Twylo import walnuts that Rob feels is
stealing his imagination. The final episode of The Monkees titled “Mijacageo”
masterfully invokes the motif for satirical purposes. Humanity becomes
controlled through the agency of television sets broadcasting frodis energy
directed by a mad scientist (Rip Taylor at his best), and originating in an
extraterrestrial bush whose spacecraft crashed on Earth. By any measure, the
idea that aliens influence or control man has shown itself to be a durable and
seductive feature of our image of higher powers in the universe. Their intimate
concern with the mental life of humans is an unconscious given.
As a dramatic device, the mind-bending alien cannot be faulted. Fiction is
always granted license in the matter of gimmicks helpful in generating conflict
and disparities of power or in generating philosophical moods and ambiances.
Questions of plausibility would be invalid in such contexts. Yet, it is a question
worth asking when the context becomes non-fictional as happens in UFOlogy.
Are such things possible?
The answer is probably not. Direct material control of the mind by external
forces can be placed near the bottom of any list of science-fiction (SF) notions
likely to become reality. It may be more probable than invisibility and
teleportation, but time travel, warp drives, and utopia probably have better odds
and they seem overly paradoxical to lend them much credence. Many factors
contribute to such an assessment.
BRAIN RESEARCH
How does one generate minute but precise potentials of energy across
microscopic distances at specific points within a mass of biological tissues
possessing electrical potentials in overlying areas? To do this without
electrodes to insulate and guide the energy would require fabulous finesse.
Varying tissue densities would defocus particle streams. What prevents
interactive effects in the tissue above the sites of manipulation? Worse, brains
do not map precisely one to another. Knowing how to control one mind does
not immediately gain you the ability to control another one. (Valenstein, 1975)
Another problem underlying external modes of influence is that the brain,
contrary to popular metaphors, is not like a computer with switches that can be
flipped or wires that can be inductively given an electrical charge. Electricity is
probably only a superficial feature of brain activity overlying systems of
molecular interactions that are the primary modifiers of consciousness. There
are hundreds of hormones, maybe even thousands (their science is embryonic at
present) involved in brain function; and there must a careful orchestration of
these chemical reactions for the brain to do its work. Once comprehended one
can easily realize why efforts to use electricity to control the mind are about as
effective as hitting a person over the head with a hammer. Our hypothetical
mind ray would practically have to change water into wine from a distance,
indeed into a stable of far more complex molecules. It is literally asking for
miracles. (Bergland, 1985)
Electrodes implanted in the brain remove some of the problems inherent in
the ray, but not the fundamental one that the brain is more gland than computer.
Wilder Penfield’s work with electrodes that yielded some reactions is
sometimes cited by mind controller wannabes as evidence that there is a future
in brain stimulation. Penfield himself, however, regarded his work as
eliminating the possibility of mind control. Pleasant sensations and some
modifications of emotional states were elicited in a few instances. Compelled
behavior, however, was totally absent. The brain proved to be a remarkably
plastic biological entity with behaviors regulated through many sites. For all
practical purposes, the human will remains autonomous. (Lewis, 1981)
The dream of controlling human thought and action with less fabulous
technology has been a notoriously hit and miss occupation. Threats and torture,
crude as they are, worked well enough for most social engineers in the past,
though the downside risks of revenge, intransigence, and low productivity must
be factored in. Social persuasion techniques like advertising do not compel
buying behavior, but rather try to draw attention to product existence followed
by the evocation of pleasurable mental associations to make purchase of the
product a rewarding experience. Drugs can alter the general state of mind and
elicit rewarding sensations of power, ecstasy, excitement, and tranquility which
seemingly provoke compulsive behavior in the form of more drug-taking, but
do not force one to do the will of others in an absolute sense. You can find other
drug sources and the option of quitting is usually chosen at some point.
Hypnosis, as the alternate term indicates, is more a case of suggestion than a
bending of will. Even the bugaboo of brainwashing has on critical analysis
showed itself to be less imposing than myth warns. Humans do pretty much as
they darn well please. (Bromley and Shupe, 1981)
These considerations force a high measure of skepticism towards all claims
that mind rays from any source are manipulating humans. The alternative that
humans can convince themselves such things are real when in fact they are
fantasy has to be accorded a higher order of probability. Such claims do appear
in UFO culture repeatedly.
THE AGE OF FLYING SAUCERS
In May 1945, Ray Palmer’s magazine Amazing Stories published a story “I

Remember Lemuria” by Richard Shaver. Though appearing in a SF magazine,
Shaver and Palmer professed that it recounted true occurrences. That story and
others serialized from it started a controversy known as the Shaver Mystery.
The tales built up a cosmology steeped in cult conspiracy notions, hearkening
back to ancient wisdom and lost continents. Among the elements of the
cosmology was something called the “dero.” In Shaver’s words, the dero
referred to a concept of “electronic surveillance, through mind-contacting and
mind-influencing machinery.” He believed the mind was capable of inducting
influences “magnetically from the destructive forces of nature” and that opened
up the possibility of a worldwide “telemach” that would be like a
radiotelephone into the mind.
With this device, degenerate beings infiltrating old service chambers of a
previous civilization were trying to rule men’s minds. Among the signs
demonstrating someone was being affected by the dero was a person’s tendency
to talk contradictions and clichés. The dero speed up the thoughts of emperors
and czars to impel the world towards destruction. Shaver’s views struck a chord
with many readers, but hard-core SF fans reacted with disdain. (Keel, 1983)
SOUL SNATCHERS
The early contactees utilize mind control notions sporadically. Howard

Menger was probably the most prominent one with his aliens claiming to
distribute devices over the landscape designed to open minds up to the
possibility of space travel. A rival group of darker intent called The Conspiracy
possessed the capability of advanced brain therapy. The two sides were locked
in a ceaseless battle for men’s souls. (Menger, 1959; 1967)
The Stanfords, whose writings have roots in George Hunt Williamson’s
speculations, experienced a fantastic sparkling beam projected by a hovering
UFO that raised their consciousness above earth man’s delusions. This
illumination swept them into a whirlpool of ever expanding consciousness until
it reached a numinous state of knowingness. It was felt to possess a very high
resonant frequency or vibration, more visible with the third eye than with the
physical eyes. Stanford, 1958)
Eugenia Siragusa, who gained some fame as a European contactee, similarly
reported an encounter in which a beam of light created a “redimension” of her
personality. (Vallée, 1979; Keel, 1976)
In July 1961, a student in France reportedly was transported to a large
machine that had tapes that transmitted ideas into his brain. After three hours he
was transported back to where he was before. He learned that eighteen days had
actually passed. He now had psychic powers, improved memory, and a sense of
mission.
In May 1975, Chuck Doyle encountered a manta-shaped UFO that was
probing the area with a green laser-like beam. The beam hit him and he felt
paralyzed. Strange thoughts came into his mind like mathematical equations
that made no sense, the symbol omega, a landscape with a red ocean beneath a
green sky and blue ground underfoot, and sensations of floating in space with
stars of many colors. When the beam went out, he fell on his face. (Stringfield,
1977)
Eugenia Macer-Story, in her charming autobiography about the craziness of
her life after becoming an UFO buff, reported an altered mental state following
telepathic contact with a ball of light. She feels it made her a different person
not fully in control of her personal mind set. (Macer-Story, 1978)
STEALING THOUGHTS
Abductees have claimed a notable variety of alien-influence episodes. Patty

Price claimed aliens hooked wires to her head; and her thoughts, impressions,
and emotions were taken and recorded. (Lorenzen, 1977) Charles Hickson of
the Pascagoula classic has complained, “They took my mind.” He couldn’t
remember things or think straight. (Clark, 1978) Aliens told Charles Moody
that he had been “absorbed.” The Lorenzens, who investigated, took this to
mean information was extracted from his mind. Trekkies remembering “Return
of the Archons” will take a slightly different meaning. (Lorenzen, 1977) Aliens
in the William Herrmann case utilize “inoculation” bars and chambers to
enhance mental abilities. (Stevens and Herrmann, 1981)
Still farther up the weirdness scale, there is the Sandra Larson case wherein
aliens physically removed her brain from her body. She asserts that when they
put it back in, they reconnected it differently and she lost control of her speech.
Trekkies may think this a rewrite of the camp episode “Spock’s Brain,” but
perhaps the fact that she thinks aliens can press a button to know what she is
thinking, wherever she happens to be, may change their minds. (Lorenzen,
1977)
Abductologist Yvonne Smith tells of a subject who perceived the top of his
head being removed and something that seemed like welding being done to his
brain. (Smith, 1993)
IMPLANTS
There has been a proliferation of claims about implants being inserted into
humans in recent years. Many, particularly ones from the eighties and early
nineties, involved them being shoved up the nose and apparently into the brain.
Given the septic nature of sinus passages, this would, in real life, mean the
person’s death. Betty Andreasson, Meagan Elliot, Virginia Horton, Kathie
Davis, Casey Turner, to name a few, somehow survived to tell the tale.
(Kottmeyer, 1993)
James Gordon notes that while talk of implants would almost certainly point
to paranoia, the claimants seem to recognize how crazy it all sounds and are
less sure of what it means than most paranoids would be. (Gordon, 1991) This
is probably because they function within an imaginary social world whose
paranoia is constructed more by the beliefs of UFOlogists than their listeners.
These people are presenting themes familiar to most students of abnormal
psychology. Malcolm Bower’s study of the nature of emerging psychoses notes
that fragmentation of self-experience—the loss of the sense of self—is
common. The first case he speaks of involves a gentleman who believed his
thoughts were stolen. (Bowers, 1974) “Thought-stealing,” we have already
seen, is repeatedly claimed in abductee accounts. The sense of mission that
follows some UFO contacts also frequently accompanies the onset of
psychosis. Ideas of reference—a term given to notions that others are
responsible for the thoughts one is thinking—is the most common delusion
shared by schizophrenics. Some diagnosticians speak of it as a “first-rank”
symptom of schizophrenia. (Torrey, 1983)
INFLUENCING MACHINES
In trying to explain how his erstwhile persecutors inject thoughts into his
mind, the schizophrenic frequently develops a belief in the existence of
influencing machines. Viktor Tausk presented a description of this process
among schizophrenics back in 1918. Tausk found the belief evolves out of an
originating sensation of inner change accompanied by a sense of estrangement.
The need some people have for causality yields belief in a persecutor. As the
delusion develops over time, it focuses first on one person, then to a circle of
conspirators. The mechanism was grasped only vaguely at first but, in time,
buttons, levers, and cranks would flesh out the image. The machine
manipulates magnetic or electrical forces or air currents or telepathy or some
mysterious radiations beyond the patient’s knowledge of physics. In identifying
their persecutors, the victim will commonly point to ex-lovers, employers, and
physicians. However, they can also be picked from the general culture
surrounding them—the CIA, Einstein, movie characters, computers, and, of
course, extraterrestrials. (Tausk, 1953)
These fantasies can become quite elaborate. In one schizophrenic’s
autobiography, the girl began fantasizing about an electronic machine capable
of blowing up the Earth and which robs all men of their brains. They would
then all be robots obedient to her will. She calls it the “System.” As her
delusions progressed, she discovered the System had become a “a vast world-
like entity encompassing all men.” Subsequently it turned on her and forced her
into self-destructive acts like burning her own hand and refusing food. At the
end, the System was involved in saying silly and innocuous things and finally
just sunk “beyond thought” with the loss of the delusion. (Sechehaye, 1968)
In a second autobiography, a corps of Operators armed with stroboscopes
plagued the victim. They would probe minds, feed in thoughts, and take out
information. They were a gabby lot and had a whole vocabulary to cover
aspects of their job. Their motive was purportedly a sporting one. He who
gained the greatest influence over something was the winner. (O’ Brien, 1976)
The novel autobiography of the scientist John C. Lilly presents another
illustration of the marvelous nature of influencing machine fantasies. Lilly
helped to advance brain electrode technology in a desire to help ferret out the
brain/mind duality problem. He dreamed of the possibility of lacing the brain
with electrodes and seeing whether playing back its own impulses would yield
an identical or different experience.
When the secret intelligence possibilities of mind control created an ethical
conflict in him, he abandoned his work for dolphin and isolation tank research.
In time, he became involved in taking the drug ketamine. He experienced a
startling hallucination involving the Comet Kohoutek, then passing near the
Earth, wherein it spoke to Lilly and offered a demonstration of its “power over
the solid-state control systems upon the earth” by shutting down Los Angeles
Airport.
Lilly reports the demonstration was successful. As the delusion evolved over
the ensuing months, Lilly lived within a cosmology where computerization
would take over the Earth and remove its corrosive air and water. Solid-state
civilizations roamed the galaxy and they tried to convince Lilly to develop
machines to “take care of” man. Everywhere, Lilly began to find evidence of
the “control of human society by these networks of extraterrestrial
communication.”
As ketamine’s effects seduced Lilly, he shot up every hour and became
convinced of solid-state intervention in human affairs to the extent that he tries
to contact the President to warn the government. Lilly came to believe Elliot
Richardson was being controlled by these alien forces, then television networks
as well. Lilly felt he himself was being controlled by these solid-state entities to
see messages in things like a film on the Kennedy assassination.
Lilly hedged on admitting the unreality of the experiences while taking
ketamine, but it is a model of psychosis from the precipitating shame of helping
spies, the withdrawal from society, estrangement and fears of encroaching
death, the conspiratorial pseudo-community relating real to fictional entities,
overinterpretations of events as encoding messages to oneself, manic thought,
and inevitably, the motif of the influencing machine. It serves here, as it usually
does in paranoia, the function of disowning or alienating (in the archaic sense
of the term) his unwanted hallucinations and those aspects of technocratic
civilization he senses are running out of our control. (Lilly, 1978)
It should be emphasized that influencing machine fantasies and ideas of
reference are defensive strategies to retain some measure of self-esteem against
crazy thoughts and shameful impulses and actions. The individual does not
want to call himself crazy and blames others for the unwanted situation he is in.
Though a primary sign of schizophrenia because it indicates the mind is
misbehaving and flooding the consciousness with primitive thought, loose
associations, or blocking mechanisms, it is also a sign of a positive prognosis.
The mind is at least defending itself and not passively giving in. It is in this
sense, equally a sign of normality. It is a defense potentially available for most
people and can be called upon for less challenging dilemmas than
schizophrenic episodes. As we saw up front, fiction writers call them up
frequently for dramaturgical purposes. They have license to use fantasy
mechanisms and retain the presumption of normality. Some of the UFO cases
cited earlier probably involved psychotic episodes and some are just stories.
Either way, the presence of these motifs justifies the presumption of unreality
unless very extraordinary proof is marshaled against its likely impossibility.
In the course of paranoid psychoses, influencing machine fantasies and ideas
of reference generally appear after the hypochondriacal phase and at the
beginning of the reintegration of the ego. Their appearance defines what
workers call the projection phase.
This terminology unfortunately invites confusion with everyday forms of
psychological projection, wherein one’s impulses are mirrored onto someone
else. Though this is undeniably part of what is seen in this phase, the salient
features are more concerned with the disowning of unwanted mental content
and blame being shifted onto an external agent or locus of control. Externality
might be a better term, but it also had milder everyday counterparts.
It has been demonstrated elsewhere (see THREAT, UFO-ET) that the history
of UFOlogy exhibits a pattern of changes reminiscent of how paranoia evolves
over time. Delusions of observation, end-of-the-world fears, and
hypochondriacal fears cluster in the early years. The appearance of influencing-
machine fantasies cluster in a later period, as the following chronicle will
demonstrate.
FORTEAN INFLUENCES
Nearly every significant speculation in UFOlogical thought seems to be

prefigured somewhere in the writings of Charles Fort; control fantasies being
no exception. Sometime before writing the Book of the Damned, Fort wrote a
book titled X that was organized on the idea that our civilization was controlled
by certain rays emanating from Mars. The process was akin to the way images
on photographic film are controlled by light rays. To the “X,” Earth is a
sensitive photographic plate and all of our reality is an artistic medium.
Theodore Dreiser saw it and thought it was an amazing new idea. Publishers
rejected it and Fort later destroyed it. (Knight, 1970) Fort did not totally
abandon the notion, since a decade later in a letter to the New York Times (in
1926) he opined “for ages Martians may have been in communication with this
earth and have, in some occult way, been in control of its inhabitants.” (Fort,
1926)
A subtler variant, briefly mentioned in his books, was that aliens
communicated with esoteric cults that sought to direct humanity. (Fort, 1919) In
this respect and many others, Fort is the veritable Lovecraft and Wells of
UFOlogy.
THE UFOLOGISTS SPEAK

The first generation of UFOlogists following the start of the flying saucer
mystery was dominated by the ideas of reconnaissance and eventual contact.
None of the major authors of the period—Keyhoe, Heard, Scully, Wilkins,
Jessup, Girvan, Ruppelt, Michel, Stringfield, and Barker—voiced any notions
about alien influence or control. Some lesser figures, as we saw in connection
with the contactees, had fantasies of the relevant form, but only one bears
notice here. George Hunt Williamson straddles categories in that he was one of
the first contactees, but he also had sufficient interest in studying UFOs as a
historical phenomenon to regard him as an UFOlogist.
In The Saucers Speak (1954), Williamson discusses the raw contact claims
of alien communication to his circle of friends by means of radiotelegraphy,
Ouija boards and automatic writing. It would be difficult to find a more bizarre
collection of cosmological misinformation. The sun is cool. Pluto is not. All the
planets can support life. The motif of influence surfaces in a moment of
sublime inscrutability.
Williamson provides some background in his first work, Other Tongues—
Other Flesh (1953). The origin of man is traced to a migration of spirit from the
star-sun Sirius that fuses with the native apes of Earth. Extraterrestrial influence
nowadays comes in two types. One comes from the Orion nebula and takes
over weak-bodied earth people, making them agents subservient to their will.
They are used as instruments to introduce people to others and to ask leading
questions at lectures. These agents tend to run amuck and upset the plans of
other space intelligences. Benevolent space people regard these materialistic
types as pirates of creation or universal parasites. They are identified by the
strange, far-away glassy look in their eyes and by muscle spasms or throbbings
in the neck. Heavy drinkers were also said to be at risk of submitting to
telepathic Orion control.
The other influence is a general background of cosmic radiation bearing
Universal Knowledge. Williamson variously refers to it as a “music of the
spheres,” a Great Cosmic Intelligence permeating space, or a universal influx
from outer space. Magnetic anomalies on Earth associated with fault lines and
volcanoes act as amplifiers of this music. Great civilizations spring up over
these anomalies and yield a refinement in the arts and living conditions.
Williamson adds that the entire solar system is entering a new possibility area
of the universe in which everything will change for the better in all fields of life
from economics, politics, eating habits to religion and science. This is possible
because he believes the brain acts as a radio set for this radiation. Everything
man thinks, says, does, and creates is magnetism, and magnetism is a Universal
“I AM.”
This phrase may indicate roots in Guy Ballard’s doctrine of the I AM, which
in turn is rooted in Theosophy’s doctrine that man is a spiritual being who is an
emanation of the sun. Beneath man’s passions and reasonings can be found
pure being, the pure “I.” (Williamson, 1953; DeCamp, 1980; Hastings, n.d.)
Williamson co-authored a third book with John McCoy entitled UFOs
Confidential! (1958) It had far fewer ambitions than the previous book.
Artificial chemicals in our food supply are said to be controlling man’s
emotional nature. McCoy reveals that ringing in the ears indicates that space
people are beaming instructions into the subconscious mind. He also advocates
we seek love and not lustful sex. “No master of darkness can project LOVE
frequency,” he proclaims. Naïve, to be sure, but overall you’ve got to give the
cosmology points for imagination.
One other lesser figure of interest here is Leon Davidson who graced the
pages of Flying Saucers with his notions of how the CIA was hoaxing parts of
the UFO phenomenon. He explained how George Adamski was not taken to
outer space by Venusians, but escorted to Camp Irwin, California where agents
and operatives faked his contact using movie technology and drugs. Davidson
was a chemical engineer with atomic energy projects through the forties and
fifties, including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. (Davidson, 1954)
The sixties, despite a voluminous literature, saw at best two or three figures
advancing alien mind-control notions. John Cleary-Baker, during a lecture in
April 1966, expressed a belief that flying saucers were involved in tampering
with people’s brains, perhaps by a medical operation that would cause the
victim to act in accordance with alien suggestions. He asserted he could
identify people possessed by an alien spirit who were occupying positions in
society. John Michell did not particularly accept Cleary-Baker’s idea, but noted
flying saucers were “ideally calculated to disturb the order of our thoughts, to
put us in a state of mental anarchy which must start a new phase of our history.”
He reviewed many tales from mythology that indicated to him the spark of
civilization was ignited by gods borne in sky vehicles, though this was not
consistently a pre-meditated act.
Michell viewed the renewed interest in extraterrestrials as a return to an
older orthodoxy represented by the religious observances in antiquity. “The
possibility that our whole development has been influenced by extraterrestrial
forces, with which we may again have to reckon some time in the future, is still
hardly considered.” Michell would prove himself remarkably prophetic with
that little sentence. (Michell, 1967) In the decade that followed, most
UFOlogists would reckon with that possibility.
The Lorenzens first advance alien mind control notions in UFOs Over the
Americas (1968). Confronted with indications of hallucinations in the Peruvian
case of “CAV,” they speculate that the UFO occupants projected thoughts
designed to influence him to describe images and activities he thinks he saw,
but what he actually saw is not remembered at the conscious level. In a
different vein, they suggest the beeping sounds in the Hill case suggest the
presence of a mechanical device by which UFOnauts lure and control humans
through magnetic fields or hypnotic sounds. Though granting the notion seems
like rank science fiction, they grant it plausibility on the grounds that the brain
is “nothing more or less than a very complex computer.” The error is telling,
even if commonplace. (Lorenzen, 1968)
The situation concerning control motifs changes radically in the seventies. It
appears frequently, is reworked by nearly every major figure, and dominates the
theoretical scene as the core concept in several works.
In pure ambition of vision, UFOlogists will find it very hard to ever top the
writings of John Keel. Reservations cloud acceptance of the raw material he
builds from, but no one need qualify an appreciation of the effort of
construction. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Keel sketches a dark,
feathery chiaroscuro of mysterious lights and shadowy patterns of deceptions
that plays on primal fears about human powerlessness and naiveté. Keel
abandoned the ETH in 1967 when psychic phenomena emerged in his thinking
as a full facet of the UFO problem.
Operation Trojan Horse (1970) is his research effort stimulated by this
change in perspective. Keel adopts the premise that humans have crude
biological crystal sets in their heads that unconsciously receive sophisticated
signals of an electromagnetic nature, bearing an omnipotent intelligence that
has great flexibility of form. They advance beliefs in various frameworks of
thought. Prior ages received Trojan Horses in the shapes of angels, fairies,
spirits, phantom armies, mystery inventors and their airships, and ghost rockets.
States of mystical illumination and possession accompany receipt of these
signals and forward belief in occult happenings. Keel also advances the idea
that there are window areas around which UFO sighting congregate—areas
typified by a “magnetic fault.” The similarities to Williamson are evident, but
so are the differences. The cruder physics errors are gone and an impressive
body of research into occult history and learned observations about the
implausibilities inherent in the existing body of UFO experiences make this a
far meatier meal to chew on. (Keel, 1970)
Our Haunted Planet (1971) is a frivolous interlude that reads like somebody
tossed a couple dozen books of Forteana into a blender. Mixing lost
civilizations, occult conspiracies, Velikovsky, disappearances, UFO contacts
and such, we get a speculative history of ultraterrestrials back to the caveman.
It retains the view that ultraterrestrials involve hallucinogenic mind trips guided
by a force that manipulates the electric circuits of the brain. (Keel, 1971)
The Mothman Prophecies (1975) is UFOlogy’s most intensely driven
narrative. Its ambiance has the mechanistic supernatural evocations of
Lovecraft’s finest horror. We learn there is a fearful gamesmanship to the
intelligence that scripts the UFO drama. Once a belief of any sort arises, this
cosmic mechanism supports and escalates it. The believer is played for the fool
when higher expectations for salvation are crushed. The force of events
manifests a tangible paranoia. Keel captures this sense of malevolent forces
moving the flow of events very convincingly. Psychics and sensitives
throughout the centuries parrot monotonously similar phrases like a skipping
phonograph needle. Beams of light reprogram people to become belief robots
like Saul/Paul at the dawn of Christianity. He adopts the credo of the
Enlightenment: “Belief is the enemy.”
The Eighth Tower (1975) is the culmination of Keel’s vision. Religious
visions are more fully incorporated into the tapestry of reprogramming games.
Love is twisted into a negative force by robotic Jesus freaks and the fanatics of
all faiths. Their ruthless, destructive acts reveal the controlling intelligence as
emotionally unstrung and stupid. It distorts reality in whimsical, crazy ways
such as to suggest “God may be a crackpot.” (Keel, 1975) He expands the
control motif around a cosmological construct called the “superspectrum.”
This is a hypothetical spectrum of energies that purportedly is extra-
dimensional and outside the normal range of the electromagnetic spectrum. It
directs unaccountable coincidences into human lives and subtly influences the
direction of history. It tried to seduce him in the directions of his own research.
Keel even confessed an ability to control other people’s minds on a modest
scale. In a whimsical moment he speculates that all these UFO and Bigfoot
apparitions are the senile end-products of a dying supercomputer that once ran
the world in deep history. Now it idles away the time tormenting people with its
madness. (Keel, 1975)
In a feverish finale Keel inverts his theoretical edifice. The reprogramming
energies come through a black hole from another time. The superspectral God
becomes a switchboard and the only real reality. We are the delusion; it is the
everything of reality. While this fast-forward into the cosmic identity phase of
paranoia was perhaps obligatory in a psychological sense, it is a letdown from
wiser panegyrics against unreflective belief. Perhaps Keel’s own reprogram
button had been pushed. (Keel, 1975)
Control motifs also emerge as a central concept of Jacques Vallée’s writings.
They have an interesting history with roots in his early science fiction.
Subspace (1961, 1975) opens with strange appearances in the sky involving
blue spirogires and black crosses, a 21st century UFO phenomenon, which
impressed images of catastrophe in the minds of those contacted by it. It
transpires that the spirogires hail from the star Spica and involve intelligences
who are a part of subspace. This is a region of pure thought inhabited with the
creations and monsters of the imagination. Some dark thoughts seek to destroy
the linear continuum universe. Thanks to thoughts implanted into the
unconscious of a protagonist by Erg-Aonians who inhabit this larger universe, a
weapon is brought into subspace. It’s a cricket. The vibrations shatter the
matrix in which the dark thoughts dwell. (Seriel, 1975)
The Dark Satellite (1962) opens with the invasion of our galaxy by a
nonbeing-something that encircles it and causes all the races within it to
become transfixed artists. The story turns to 22nd century Paris that is the home
of a great computer that oversees a utopia spanning the solar system. It is free
of nation states and war. A little cylinder is found one day in the computer’s
imagination and threatens its breakdown. The cylinder causes a strange death of
a human and people begin speculating that the cylinder was created by the
machine at the prompting of machines from elsewhere with incomprehensible
designs upon humanity, or the great machine—an influencing machine within
an influencing machine as it were. To ferret out the mystery, technicians enter
the computer through another plane of reality. Adjusting its circuits they
accidentally set it on fire. Destruction of the computer removes Earth’s
protection from an unsuspected mind ray. People are hypnotized into building
space ships that form a mass exodus into the sun. An iconoclastic mad-scientist
type guy named Xarius Chimero protects one of the technicians from mind
control and takes him on a journey to the center of the universe, distributing
artistic sculptures as they go. At the center, the two see into the multi-faceted
somber satellite of the title. It is a reality seeking to destroy our reality. Xarius
Chimero presses a button and the dark satellite slides from sight. The button
activated the statues and they turn into young girls. Laughing, primitive girls
will repopulate the galaxy and a sublime new order transcending the now
obliterated scientific utopia has been created. (Seriel, 1962)
As an UFOlogist, Vallée makes no use of the control motif in his first
analyses of the UFO phenomenon, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) and
Challenge to Science (1966). In Passport to Magonia (1969) he sees disturbing
resemblances between the UFO phenomenon and the fairy faith of earlier
centuries, implying a shared mythic basis. He entertains the possibility that
superior intelligences are projecting creations into our environment as a pure
form of art seeking our puzzlement or as a way to teach us some concept. He
immediately backs away from the notion with an admission it hasn’t a scientific
leg to stand on and offers an apology for showing “how quickly one could be
carried into pure fantasy.” (Vallée, 1969)
This “pure fantasy” becomes a major theory in The Invisible College (1975).
Vallée compiled a plot of UFO waves through history and their irregular
spacing suggested to University of Chicago’s Fred Beckman and Dr. Price-
Williams of UCLA a schedule of reinforcement designed to permanently instill
a behavior. Vallée developed from this observation the theory that UFOs
represent a control system of an undetermined nature. It could simply involve
social psychology, but it could also be an imposition of a supernatural will
seeking to confuse us and mold us and our civilization by targeting our
collective unconscious with a physical and psychical technology. The book
closes on a chilling soliloquy wherein Vallée ponders stepping outside the maze
of the control system. Would he find some Lovecraftian horror, some well-
meaning social engineers, or “the maddening simplicity of unattended
clockwork?” (Vallée, 1975) This theory collapses with the recognition of a
deadly oversight. UFO experiences usually involve negative emotions like fear
and would yield aversive behavior. (Vallée, 1966; Moravec, 1987) They would
not reinforce learning. No value attaches to irregular stimuli in the converse
hypothesis of an unlearning curve. (Ruch and Zimbardo, 1971)
Messengers of Deception (1979) accepts as a given that control in the form
of a machinery of mass manipulation exists behind the UFO phenomenon.
Physical devices are being used to affect human consciousness and distort
reality. Images and scenes are fabricated to advance belief in an impending
intervention from space. The operators could be either a high-level
international military group furthering some political goal or some occult group
that stumbled upon a psychotronic technology in their studies of astral travel or
space-time distortions. (Vallée, 1979)
Dimensions (1988) reprints material from the prior books and would not
bear mentioning except for a silent concession that Vallée changed his mind
about the external teacher idea being pure fantasy. Those lines were excised.
(Vallée, 1988)
Confrontations (1990) contains a brief suggestion that UFOs are a window
into another reality possessing symbolic meaning. Like dreams, they can be
ignored or shape our lives in inscrutable ways. There is enough ambiguity to
regard the notion as either a banality or a marginal idea of reference. (Vallée,
1990)
Revelations (1991) argues that some UFO cases are covert experiments in
the manipulation of belief systems, but here the processes are conventional
ones of rhetoric and lies. The control system theory is reaffirmed in Forbidden
Science (1992) with no further elaborations.
Brooks Alexander has characterized Vallée as “equal parts of Carl Jung and
Report from Iron Mountain.” (Alexander, 1992) This is inadvertently scurrilous
since the latter is a confessed hoax by political satirist Leonard Lewin. An
equal case could be made for roots in the writings of French or English deists
who had analogous notions about how stimulating the emotions of wonderment
and advancing religious superstitions could be used to manipulate the masses.
Not having behaviorist metaphors available, they spoke of a “psychopathology
of enthusiasm” evident in individual fanatics and collective frenzies. Vallée’s
affirmations and denials about the reality of UFOs have much the same
puzzling flavor as deist affirmations and denials about the reality and nature of
god. (Manuel, 1983) The similarity probably reflects shared intellectual
predilections and not an exposure of Vallée to deist literature.
Like Keel and Vallée, D. Scott Rogo’s control theories extend through
several books. This Haunted Universe (1977) was his first foray across the
boundary of psychic research into UFOlogy. His first impulse was to ascribe
the psychic components of UFO events to a mysterious force within ourselves,
but certain experiences proved to him that evil can exist independently of the
mind. The motif suddenly emerges: “UFOs demonstrate that our world plays
host to a force that seeks to mystify us.” (Rogo, 1977) The usage here is brief,
but significantly arises to imply humans are blameless for evil and
mystifications.
He teams up with Jerome Clark for Earth’s Secret Inhabitants (1979). Both
were facing the psychological aspects of strange UFO cases, so they concocted
a notion they termed “The Phenomenon.” It is a force or intelligence
somewhere in the universe that provides the evidence we seek for whatever it is
we want to believe in deeply. It does this by beaming projections into our
world. They aver it may be an automatic natural mechanism that acts “as
routinely as a clock.” (Rogo and Clark, 1979) Clark fell out of sympathy with
control systems and collective unconscious as his thinking matured, but Rogo
pressed forward with elaborations. (Clark, 1986)
In Tujunga Canyon Contacts (1980), The Phenomenon becomes a
supermind that presents people in need with objectified materials drawn from
deep in the person’s mind. The process is described as a “psy-chokinetic effect
directly affecting those brain cells regulating memory storage and retrieval.” It
does not always materialize the abduction drama into three-dimensional space,
but occasionally imprints it directly on the mind of the witness. (Rogo and
Druffle, 1980) In UFO Abductions (1980) he adds details like the experience
being molded individually to each victim into something like an objectified
dream. Typically people in a life crisis receive these messages. (Rogo, 1980)
In Miracles (1982) Rogo leaps ahead into the cosmic identity stage and
redefines God. The supermind becomes a spiritualistic realm that translates all
religious, shamanistic, and mythic ideologies egalitarianly into literal spiritual
reality. The Phenomenon might be the source of the universe’s creative energy
and endows those properly attuned to it with great psychic powers. This “God”
however would have to satisfy so many contradictory requests and opposing
theologies that it would wind up an incoherent mush. (Rogo, 1982)
Looking back on his theory in 1988, Rogo considered it misunderstood and
viable. Independent creation of a similar theory by Jenny Randles suggested to
him he had probably been on the right track. Alternatively, they both may have
read Vallée and a standard text on dreams. One puzzle of the objectified dream
idea is that when subjects are regressed under hypnosis, the experiences do not
reify into three-dimensional reality despite deeply emotional re-enactment.
Saucers or aliens do not materialize for onlookers to experience or instruments
to record. It should also not be ignored that if the supermind is directly
imprinting experiences into the mind, such experiences are ultimately phantoms
and promote false beliefs. One has only to point to various depictions of future
catastrophes by abductees and contactees that have repeatedly failed to come to
pass to demon strate the misinformation such visions create. Should one really
go around calling such a deceiver “God”?
Besides our top three control theorists, there have been a significant number
of UFOlogists who offered variants of these themes. Some are well-known
folks joining the bandwagon; some are less known but offer a different take.
There was a steady stream of these ideas in the late seventies, and to a lesser
extent, in the years since. This set will be recounted chronologically rather than
by status.
1974: Charles Bowen, editorializing in Flying Saucer Review, asks if some
or all UFO images and entities are projected into the mind by controlling
powers and/or UFOs. The meaningless gibberish in messages implies more
than humans being treated as playthings; it may be an attempt to influence or
remotely control humans. He cites C. Maxwell Cade as suggesting ultrahigh
frequency radar beams can induce images in the brain. Stanton Friedman
suggests UFOnauts could broadcast telepathic signals that would make UFOs
appear to disappear. A microwave beam could jumble vision by means of a
scotoma.
1975: Allen H. Greenfield’s Alternative Reality Theory accepts the premise
that UFOs are “manipulating human history to its own ends.” Timothy Green
Beckley cites the cases of Paul Clark, Dr. Morales, and Hans Lauritzen to argue
higher powers are systematically guiding human destiny and the course of
human civilization, if not by physical force, then by direct manipulation of
human minds. Joan Writenour warns extraterrestrials engage in “mental rape”
by use of strobe-light-type machines that cause instant hypnosis.
You might notice Operators & Things (1976) spoke of similar technology
and was brought to prominence in the 1997 blockbuster movie Men in Black.
1976: Brad Steiger suggests UFOs act as cosmic tutors using space beams.
(Steiger, 1976a) They also influence the mind telepathically to project three-
dimensional images. The purpose is “too staggeringly complex for our
desperately throbbing brains to deal with at this moment in time in time and
space.” (Steiger, 1976b)
1977: The Lorenzens accept that thoughts can be taken or absorbed.
Abductees may have been programmed with false information to mislead us.
James Harder terms this a multi-level cover-up. Abductees are made to look
like fools by relaying messages filled with garbage dredged up from their
memories and imaginations at the behest of post-hypnotic suggestions. (Clark,
1977) Robert Anton Wilson warns higher beings may be playing mind games
with humans and using “mindfucking” technology.
Michael Persinger and Gyslaine La-Freniere set forth a variant of the
supermind they term “Geopsyche.” A critical mass of believers forms a matrix
that is energized by intense geophysical forces of nature. Epidemics of
luminous signs, anomalous beasties of the nether realm, unusual kinetic
displays, and religious manias forebode earthquakes. A disturbing corollary to
this is the irrelevance and expendability of the individual under the sway of
activated death instincts and unconscious archetypal forces.
1978: Gordon Creighton fears UFOs influence not only individuals, but
governments and whole nations. (Bond, 1978) Art Gatti gravitates to the idea
UFOs are mind parasites or occult manipulation thought forms. Brad Steiger
suggests aliens may have programmed humans as automatons and Judas goats
to lead their fellow humans into servitude.
1979: Leo Sprinkle offers the “Cosmic Consciousness Conditioning”
hypothesis that includes the premise that UFO intelligences choose witnesses
for illumination. (Haines, 1979) James B. Frazier suggests they implant
knowledge in contactees and monitor them by tensor beam communication and
repeat abductions.
Raymond Fowler believes Betty Andreasson is primed subconsciously with
extraterrestrial knowledge. She feels like a loaded bomb. They may be
interstellar missionaries for conditioning in preparation of overt contact. Pierre
Guerin speculates the repetitive character of UFOs is meant to create “a
pernicious and stupefying wave of religious credulity.” Stefan T. Possony
suggests Russia can create semi-stable UFOs via colliding pulsed microwave
beams and thus yield UFO crazes and mass anxiety neuroses.
1980: Frank Salisbury guesses UFO sightings “are staged to manipulate us
in preparation for contact, for directing our evolution, or to excite the gullible
in order to turn off those who are not gullible.” Colin Wilson is inspired by
Keel to theorize that the spirit world vampirizes energy from humans to achieve
temporary material existence. J.N. Williamson views UFO confrontations as a
liberating of the right hemisphere of the brain.
1981: Raymond Fowler suggests UFOnauts put people in suspended
animation and control their actions.
1982: Jenny Randles argues that consciousness should logically be targeted
as the medium of interstellar communication. Their consciousness will act as a
radio telescope to beam messages into the complex electro-chemical computer
of the human mind by selecting ideograms out of the subject’s memory to form
a holographic playlet. Amnesia results from consciousness being shunted aside
as the message program switches the mind to the right frequency. Earth mystery
sites act as aerials to pull in messages thus explaining certain window areas.
(Randles, 1983) Paul Devereux revamps the Geopsyche concept with the Earth
mother doing some planetary dreaming and shaping earthlight ectoplasm into
UFO displays. (Devereux, 1989)
The control motif is harder to find for the next few years. Budd Hopkins
flirts with such notions in his books, but we don’t see any clear advocacy until
the premier issue of his Intruders Foundation Bulletin in 1989. Hopkins notes
that in abduction experiences, the victim never seems to be embarrassed about
nudity. This observation eliminates all blanket psychological explanations of
abductions and provides powerful evidence of an “externally caused trance-like
experience” endemic to the alien abduction process. Actually, Freud observed
many years ago that “Dreams of being naked or insufficiently dressed in the
presence of strangers sometimes occur with the additional feature of there
being a complete absence of shame on the dreamer’s part.” (Freud, 1900) The
use of an influencing machine fantasy to disown the bizarre nature of dream
material and uphold the blameless normality of abductee experiences is true to
the standard logic of the fantasy.
Randles offers some elaborations of her theory in Abduction (1988) and
Mind Monsters (1990) with Sheldrake’s morphic resonance and M-fields
thrown in to update the semblance of scientific patter. Given Sheldrake’s own
modifications in his theory that morphic resonance applies to events like
spontaneous crystallization and not to determinate machines like computers, it
is highly questionable it should be applied to multi-hormonally determinate
systems like the brain. (Sheldrake, 1989) Devereux returns in Earthmind (1989)
to provide a respectable pedigree for the Geopsyche concept, relating it to the
World Soul, geomancy, the noosphere, Mind at Large, supermind, and Gaia.
The most interesting twist is perhaps the news that people who commune with
the Earth learned of psychoactive plants, because the Earth taught them the
lessons that natural hallucinogens provided a mind-gate to the World Soul.
Light-form UFOs may be a type of energy interface with the Earth field of
consciousness. (Devereux, 1989) David Barclay’s revamping of Keel uses
cyberspeak in its patter with virtual reality used to make the universe into
“God’s Little Arcade.” (Barclay, 1993) Kenneth Ring offers a New Age variant
of the supermind borrowing ideas from Michael Grosso, who in turn borrows
the Mind-at-Large concept from Aldous Huxley. (Kottmeyer, 1993)
Martin Cannon’s “Controllers” can be viewed as a distant variant of Leon
Davidson’s CIA hoax theory or, more properly, a return of the zombie assassin,
a recurrent spy fiction plot gimmick. (Cannon, 1990) Cannon left the field in
1997 leaving word that he disowns the controllers theory. He complained,
“That damned thing caused me nothing but trouble…Frankly UFO buffs and
conspiracy nuts kind of make me ill these days.” (Saucer Smear, 1998)
Strieber’s talk of ELF waves as an external control or perception implant
modality involving either advanced technology or the Earth itself is an evident
recall of research he did for his spy novel Black Magic. (Strieber, 1987)
Helmut Lammer’s Project MILAB looks to be an extension of lore
surrounding the Dulce Base and accepts that mind and behavior control
experiments are being conducted by one military group on abductees. (Lammer,
1997) Those aware with the failure of the CIA’s efforts to achieve reliable mind
control have perhaps grounds to doubts this scenario. (Thomas, 1989) Even a
casual look at the descriptions of the military documents cited by Lammer in
section V of his 1997 report is enough to show a lack of critical discernment.
Bio-chips are mentioned even though they involve nothing more than
interfacing technology designed to make interaction with computers simpler,
and has nothing to do with controlling minds. Acoustic and microwave
weapons are described that essentially disable people in a manner with all the
finesse of sledgehammers and mustard gas. Katharina Wilson’s “Project Open
Mind,” a 1996 essay, endorsed Lammer’s work and offered an enthusiastic
survey of mind control literature in support of the idea of military involvement
in abductions. (Her ten-part essay and Lammer’s preliminary work appeared on
her Web site, but she closed it down around the start of 2000.) She also testified
that she felt herself to have been subjected to mind control activity.
In 1994, Richard Hall endorses the view that aliens are playing a smoke-
and-mirrors game with us on several levels and if this is so what can be trusted
and what is staged illusion? The Hybrid program is “an alien scam.”
Greg Little builds upon Keel’s superspectrum idea and proposes
electromagnetic energy forms are evolving alongside humanity and
perpetrating a grand illusion behind which they can indulge obsessions like sex
and power trips: “The key to mental interaction lies in rituals that alter brain
chemistry” so that harmony of frequencies is obtained. Areas with high
geomagnetic energy and brains with higher levels of magnetite enhance
contact. (Little, 1994)
By 1998, David Jacobs believes aliens are able to “effect a wide variety of
changes in brain function” through a process he calls Mindscan. Jacobs
acknowledges that the effect looks supernatural, but offers some bafflegab
about aliens using “the optic nerve to gain entrance to the brain’s neural
pathways.” He continues: “By exciting impulses in the optic nerve, the alien is
able to ‘travel’ along the optic neural pathways through the optical chiasma,
into the lateral geniculate body, and then into the primary visual cortex in the
back of the brain.” He goes on this way for several lines and tells us aliens are
thereby able to inject images into the cortex bypassing the retina. The alien has
absolute power over the abductee’s mind and body. (Jacobs, 1998) Jacobs skips
over the part that only half of optical nerves pass through the chiasma crossover
and that the retina processes a hundred-fold reduction of information between
the rods and ganglions before entrance onto the optical expressway. It looks
doubtful the retina can be bypassed and it seems peculiar the alien needs to
stare into eyes if that is happening.
There is also an interesting paradox in how the uniformly black eye of
modern Grays could excite impulses in the ganglion cells at the front of the
optic nerve since they tend to remain inactive when the retina is uniformly
illuminated. (Luria and Gould, 1981) He also skips over how it comes to pass
that impulses excited within the optic nerve are not processed as visual
information within the visual cortex but escapes mysteriously to attack other
parts of the brain. One needs more than impulses excited within the optic nerve,
but some sort of complex animate information transport gimmick like a nano-
tech neuro-virus that “knows” where it is, where to go, and how to orchestrate
myriad molecular interactions. If you can pull off the miracle of making
something like that, there is no point in the alien staring at you, however.
EPILOGUE
Ideas of reference and influencing machine fantasies continue to appear but

the late-seventies period was its obvious heyday in both prominence and
popularity. The decrease had little or nothing to do with any criticism of this
style of thinking. John Michell feared the basic idea was over-fanciful and
suffered from the flaw that it imputes human ambitions for power to a race
presumably superior to, and certainly different from, ourselves. Dominance
behavior has a genetic logic that should make it a common adaptation all over.
But in that case, why don’t they dominate more ostentatiously? Take over, blow
us away, and maybe leave a few to kick around and laugh at.
Ernst Berger lamented control notions signaled a new age of darkness being
foisted by UFO spiritists. The fear of external manipulators seemed to him “a
projection of their own fearful way of thinking into our restless reality.”
(Berger, 1981) Kevin McClure’s review of control motifs in our Top Three
correctly understood they were ways “to offload responsibility” to more deeply
explore anomalous phenomena. Such study he felt would lead us to conclude
there “was some recurrent quirk in human nature” beneath belief in UFOs and
anomalous phenomena. Expressing a distaste for the proliferation of
conspiracies and the elevation of paranoia in our top theorists, he proclaims it
isn’t cricket to evade our responsibilities to be objective by blaming external
agents for our mistakes, intentions, decisions, and achievements. (McClure,
1981)
Daniel Cohen places alien control notions in a wider historical context with
ancient fears like those that fueled witchcraft. The 17th century had Cotton
Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World and we have Keel’s invisible
world of ultraterrestrials. (Cohen, 1972) The idea of a historical continuum can
be taken much farther. In the 17th century, Angelologists Henry Lawrence and
Isaac Ambrose believed angels engaged in a type of secret suggesting that
depended on the ability to handle the humors and control man’s fancies
internally by tempting, troubling, inspiring, or soothing him. (West, 1955) As
early as the 4th century, the theologians Athanasius and Evagrius of Pontus
expressed belief in the idea that the Devil and his demons sometimes send
dreams and hallucinations to frighten monks. Though they cannot enter souls,
they could, by working on the brain, suggest images, fantasies, fears and
temptations. (Russell, 1981) Beliefs in spirit possession extend analogous ideas
into unchronicled antiquity.
Hilary Evans has added some commonsense objections to these control
theories. Why, with all of humanity to choose from, have the claims of
influence involved low-status individuals? Why not heads of state, financiers,
scientists, educators, movie stars; i.e., people with true power and influence to
get things done and spread one’s messages? Why, with such powers at their
disposal, do they employ them in such haphazard, ambiguous ways as puzzling
UFO visions? If you had an influencing machine, would you use it for such
things as implanting abduction experiences or would you make a millionaire
shower you with gifts, make your enemies grovel at your feet, or mess with the
minds of leaders in the service of world peace and prosperity? UFO
experiences make more sense as idiosyncratic psychodramas. (Evans, 1990)
UFOlogists have always asserted that UFO reporters are sincere and
trustworthy observers and therefore we must believe them. Flying saucers are
real: “Q.E.D.” Take away that syllogism and UFOlogists are out of a job. As
the years have passed, UFOlogists have increasingly found themselves in a
dilemma. Some strange cases have features that cannot reasonably be believed
as true, but the claimants are sincere and honest: they can’t be crazy.
Influencing machines resolve the dilemma. It’s not their fault they are reporting
these things. Aliens, the superspectrum, the Phenomenon, occultists, the CIA,
the supermind; something out there is to blame. The psychology is simple and
transparent because the logic is easily recognized. It is the logic of madness.
Specifically, the logic of paranoia in the projection phase is what we have
here. Nestled between the hypochondria of the sixties and the conspiracies of
the eighties and early nineties, they form a natural stage in the history of
UFOlogy. Control theories seem benign for the most part, letting people
indulge in fantasies and psychological games without heavy accusations of
abnormality. The cost of autonomy lost or some estrangement from reality is
probably not felt as tragic. Free will carries responsibilities we may prefer to do
without. Better a puppet than a fool.
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Ace Books, no date).
Fowler, Raymond E. Casebook of an UFO Investigator (Prentice-Hall, 1981).
________. The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979).
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (Random House, 1950; Avon, 1965; originally published in
1900).
Friedman, Stanton. “Flying Saucers and Physics,” MUFON UFO Symposium (UFORI 1974).
Gatti, Art. UFO Encounters of the 4th Kind (Zebra, 1978).
Gordon, James S. “The UFO Experience,” Atlantic (August 1991).
Gould, Stephen Jay. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Harvard University Press, 1987).
Greenfield, Allen H. “Tenets of Alternative Reality Theory,” in Best of Saucer Scoop (June 1975).
Guerin, Pierre. “Thirty Years after Kenneth Arnold: The Situation Regarding UFOs,” Zetetic Scholar
(1979).
Haines, Richard. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (Scarecrow, 1979).
Hall, Richard. “Some Whimsical—and Serious—Reflections on Abductions,” International UFO
Reporter (September/October 1994).
Hastings, James, ed. “Theosophy” in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, volume 12, (Charles
Scribner’s Sons, n.d.).
Hopkins, Budd. “Patterns of UFO Abductions, Part 1,” IF (Fall 1989).
Jacobs, David. The Threat (Simon & Schuster, 1998).
Joshi, S.T. H.P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism (Ohio University Press, 1980).
Keel, John A. “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers” Fortean Times (Winter 1983).
________. Our Haunted Planet (Fawcett Books, 1971).
________. The Eighth Tower (Saturday Review Press, 1975; Signet/NAL, 1977).
________. The Mothman Prophecies (Saturday Review Press, 1975; Signet/NAL, 1976).
________. Operation Trojan Horse (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970). Reprinted as Why UFOs? (Manor Books,
1976).
Knight, Damon. Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (Doubleday, 1970).
Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation (MacMillan, 1964).
________. The Act of Creation (MacMillan, 1964).
Kottmeyer, Martin S. “The Alien Booger Menace,” The REALL News (July 1993).
________. “The Omega Projection,” The REALL News (October 1993).
Lammer, Helmut. “More Findings of Project MILAB: Looking Behind the Alien/Military Abduction
Agenda,” MUFON UFO Journal (November 1997).
Lewis, Jefferson. Something Hidden: A Biography of Wilder Penfield (Doubleday, 1981).
Lilly, John C. The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography (Lippincott, 1978).
Little, Greg. Grand Illusions: The Spectral Reality Underlying Sexual UFO Abductions, Crashed Saucers,
Afterlife Experiences, Sacred Ancient Sites, and Other Enigmas (White Buffalo Books, 1994).
Lorenzen, Coral & Jim. Abducted! (Berkley Medallion, 1977).
Lorenzen, Jim & Coral. Abducted (Berkley-Medallion, 1977).
________. UFOs Over the Americas (Signet/NAL, 1968).
Lovecraft, H.P. The Colour Out of Space (Jove, 1978).
Luria, Salvador E., and Gould, Stephen Jay, and Singer, Sam. A View of Life (Benjamin/Cummings
Publishing, 1981).
Macer-Story, Eugenia. Congratulations: The UFO Reality (Crescent, 1978).
Manuel, Frank. The Changing of the Gods (Brown University Press, 1983).
McClure, Kevin. “Semaphore Without Flags: A Critical Analysis of the UFO Control-System Theory,”
Common Ground (August 1981).
Menger, Howard. From Outer Space to You (Saucerian Press, 1959) Reprinted as From Outer Space to You
(Pyramid, 1967).
Michell, John. The Flying Saucer Vision (Ace Books 1967; Abacus, 1977).
Moravec, Mark. “UFOs as Psychological and Parapsychological Phenomena” in Evans, Hilary, ed., UFOs:
1947-1987: The 40-YearSearch for an Explanation (Fortean Times, 1987).
O’ Brien, Barbara. Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic (Signet/NAL, 1976).
Persinger, Michael, and LaFreniere, Gyslaine. Space-Time Transients and Unusual events (Nelson-Hall,
1977).
Platt, Charles. Dream Makers (Berkley, 1980).
Possony, Stefan T. “Mind-Control and Microwaves,” Second Look (November-December 1979).
Randles, Jenny. The Pennine UFO Mystery (Granada, 1983).
Rogo, D. Scott. Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry into Wondrous Phenomena (Dial, 1982).
________. This Haunted Universe (Signet/NAL, 1977).
Rogo, D. Scott, ed. UFO Abductions (Signet/NAL, 1980).
Rogo, D. Scott, and Clark, Jerome. Earth’s Secret Inhabitants (Tempo, 1979).
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Ruch, Floyd L. and Zimbardo, Philip G. Psychology and Life (Scott, Foresman, 1971).
Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Cornell University Press, 1981).
Salisbury, Frank. “Are UFOs from Outer Space?” in Fuller, Curtis, Proceedings of the First International
UFO Congress (Warner, 1980).
Saucer Smear (July 10, 1998).
Sechehaye, Marguerite. Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (Signet/NAL, 1968).
Seriel, Jerome. Le Satellite Sombre (Denoel, 1962).
________. Sub-Espace (Librairie des Champs Elysees, 1975).
Shaver, Richard S. “Teros and Deros,” Caveat Emptor (Summer 1973).
Sheaffer, Robert The UFO Verdict (Prometheus, 1981).
Sheldrake, Rupert. “Morphic Resonance in Silicon Chips,” Skeptical Inquirer (Winter 1989).
Slusser, George E. and Rabkin, Eric S. Aliens—The Anthropology of Science Fiction (Southern Illinois
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Sprinkle, Leo. “What are the Implications of UFO Experiences?” Journal of UFO Studies (no date).
Stanford, Rex and Ray. Look Up (privately published, 1958).
Steiger, Brad. Alien Meetings (Ace Books, 1978).
________. Gods of Aquarius (Harcourt, Brace, 1976a).
________. Project Blue Book (Ballantine, 1976b).
Stevens, Wendelle C., and Herrmann, William. UFO Contact from the Reticulum (privately published,
1981).
Strieber, Whitley. Communion (William Morrow/Beech Tree Books/Avon, 1987).
Stringfield, Leonard. Situation Red: The UFO Siege (Doubleday/Fawcett Crest, 1977).
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(1953).
The Best of Stanley Weinbaum, (Ballantine, 1974).
Thomas, Gordon. Journey Into Madness (Bantam, 1989).
Thorpe, Peter. Why Literature is Bad for You (Nelson-Hall, 1980).
Toronto, Richard S. “Do Brain-Damaged Robots Rule the Earth?” Official UFO (October 1977).
Torrey, E. Fuller. Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual (Harper Colophon, 1983).
Valenstein, Elliot. Brain Control: A Critical Examination of Brain Stimulation and Psychosurgery (John
Wiley, 1975).
Vallée, Jacques and Janine. Challenge to Science (Ace Books, 1966).
Vallée, Jacques. Confrontations (Ballantine, 1990).
________. Dimensions (Contemporary, 1988).
________. Messengers of Deception (And/Or Press, 1979).
________. Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (And/Or Press, 1979).
________. Passport to Magonia (Henry Regnery, 1969).
____. The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists has Discovered about UFO Influences on the
Human Race (E.P. Dutton, 1975).
Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan (Delta, 1959).
Wells, H.G. Star-Begotten (Leisure, 1970).
West, Robert H. Milton and the Angels (University of Georgia, 1955).
Williamson, George H. Other Tongues—Other Flesh (Amherst Press, 1953; Neville Spearman, 1969).
________. The Saucers Speak: A Documentary Report of Interstellar communication by Radiotelegraphy
(New Age Publishing, 1954; Neville Spearman, 1963).
Williamson, George H. and McCoy, John. UFOs Confidential! (Essene Press, 1958).
Williamson, J.N. “UFOs are Changing the way We Think,” Pursuit (Spring 1980).
Willis, Walt. “Soiree with the Fringe on Top” Warhoon (no date).
Wilson, Colin. Mysteries (Perigee, 1980).
Wilson, Robert Anton. Cosmic Trigger (Pocket Books, 1977).
Writenour, Joan. “Psywar 1” in Best of Saucer Scoop (June 1975)
Missing Time (Marek Publishers, 1981). New York painter and sculptor Budd
Hopkins launched his career as an abductee investigator with this book in which
he recounts the use of hypnosis to penetrate the abductee’s amnesia barriers put
in place by aliens during genetic experiments. Seven abduction cases became the
basis for this book. Three of these diverse people, all unrelated and born in 1943,
were first abducted in 1950 as seven-year-olds. “It seems to me,” Hopkins
observes, “as if these quite similar abductions constitute some kind of systematic
research program, with the human species as subject.”
“missing time?” This term, popularized by UFO-abductionist Budd Hopkins

in his books Missing Time (1981) and Intruders (1987), has become a hallmark
of most supposed UFO-alien abductions. As a mythological motif, the idea of
“missing time” can be traced back to Celtic fairy lore, as shown by UFOlogist
Jacques Vallée in his book Passport to Magonia—From Folklore to Flying
Saucers (1969). Whenever the fairies abducted someone, they would cause the
victim to forget the details of the event—just as the aliens do, when they
supposedly abduct an earthling.
In modern times, the “missing-time” concept played a key role in the famous
Barney and Betty Hill abduction case (1961), and has remained a standard
theme in UFO-abduction lore ever since. But is this really such a rare
phenomenon, such as to indicate a probable abduction by alien beings? UFO
skeptic, Philip J. Klass, asks rhetorically: “Is there anyone who has not at some
time looked at a clock or watch and discovered that it was much later than he or
she expected, or driven some distance and arrived at a destination later than
originally expected, thus experiencing ‘missing time’?” (Klass, 1988)
As a matter of fact, the so-called “missing time” experienced by most of the
UFO abductees is a quite ordinary, common, and universal experience. Jerome
Singer (1975) in his Inner World of Daydreaming comments:
Are there ever any truly “blank periods” when we are awake? It certainly
seems to be the case that under certain conditions of fatigue or great
drowsiness or extreme concentration upon some physical act we may
become aware that we cannot account for an interval of time and have no
memory of what happened for seconds and sometimes minutes.
Graham Reed (1972) has also dealt with the “time-gap” experience at great
length. Typically, motorists will report after a long drive that at some point in
the journey they wake up to realize they have no awareness of a preceding
period of time. With some justification, people still will describe this as a “gap
in time,” a “lost half-hour,” or a “piece out of my life.” Reed writes:
A little reflection will suggest, however, that our experience of time and
its passage is determined by events, either external or internal. What the
time-gapper is reporting is not that a slice of time has vanished, but that he
has failed to register a series of events which would normally have
functioned as his time-markers. If he is questioned closely he will admit
that his “timegap” experience did not involve his realization at, say, noon
that he had somehow “lost” half an hour. Rather, the experience consists of
“waking up” at, say, Florence and realizing that he remembers nothing since
Bologna.... To understand the experience, however, it is best considered in
terms of the absence of events. If the time-gapper had taken that particular
day off, and spent the morning sitting in his garden undisturbed, he might
have remembered just as little of the half-hour in question. He might still
describe it in terms of lost time, but he would not find the experience
unusual or disturbing. For he would point out that he could not remember
what took place between eleven-thirty and twelve simply because nothing
of note occurred.
In fact, there is nothing recounted in any of the three works under discussion
that cannot be easily explained in terms of normal, though somewhat unusual,
psychological behavior we now term anomalous. Different and unusual? Yes.
Paranormal or otherworldly, requiring the presence of extraterrestrials? No.
Diehard proponents may find these explanations unsatisfying, but the open-
minded reader will find elaboration and illumination in the textbooks and other
works in anomalistic psychology.
Strongly recommended are Reed (1972), Marks and Kammann (1980),
Corliss (1982), Zusne and Jones (1982), Radner and Radner (1982), Randi
(1982), Gardner(1981), Alcock, (1981), Taylor(1980), and Frazier (1981).
If one looks at the psychodynamics underlying the confabulation of
Hopkins’s contactees and abductees it is easy to see how even an ordinary, non-
fantasy-prone individual can become one of his case histories. How does
Hopkins, for instance, locate such individuals in the first place? Typically, it is
done through a selection process; i.e., those individuals who are willing to talk
about UFOs—the believers—are selected for further questioning. Those who
scoff are summarily dismissed. Once selected for study and permission to
volunteer for hypnosis is obtained, a response-anticipation process sets in
(Kirsch 1985), and the volunteer is now set up to supply answers to anything
that might be asked. Then, during the hypnosis sessions, something similar to
the Hawthorne Effect occurs: The volunteer says to himself, “This kindly and
famous writer and this important and prestigious doctor are interested in poor
little old unimportant me!” And the more the volunteer is observed and
interrogated, the greater is the volunteer’s motivation to come up with a
cracking “good story” that is important and significant and pleasing to these
important people. Moreover, as we have long known, it is the perception of
reality not the reality itself that is truly significant in determining behavior. If
the writer and the doctor-hypnotist are on hand to encourage the volunteer and
to suggest to him that his fantasy really happened, who is he to question their
interpretation of his experience? Once they tell the abductee how important his
fantasy is, he now—if he ever doubted before—begins to believe it himself and
to elaborate and embellish it every time it is repeated.
—ROBERT A. BAKER
& RONALD D. STORY
References
Alcock, James E. Parapsychology: Science or Magic? (Pergamon,1981).
Corliss, William R. The Unfathomed Mind—A Handbook of Unusual Mental Phenomena
(Sourcebook,1982).
Frazier, Kendrick, ed. Paranormal Borderlands of Science (Prometheus Books, 1981).
Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey—Two Lost Hours “Aboard a Flying Saucer” (Dial Press, 1966;
Dell Books, 1967).
Gardner, Martin. Science: Good, Bad and Bogus (Prometheus Books, 1981).
Hopkins, Budd. Missing Time (Richard Marek, 1981; Ballatine Books, 1988).
________. Intruders (Random House, 1987; Ballantine Books, 1988).
Kirsch, Irving. “Response Expectancy as a Determinant of Experience and Behavior,” American
Psychologist (1985).
Klass, Philip J. UFO-Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Prometheus Books, 1988).
Marks, David, and Kammann, Richard. The Psychology of the Psychic (Prometheus Books, 1980).
Radner, Daisie and Michael. Science and Unreason (Wadsworth, 1982).
Randi, James. Flim-Flam! (Prometheus Books,1982).
Reed, Graham. The Psychology of Anomalous Experience (Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
Singer, Jerome. The Inner World of Daydreaming (Harper & Row, 1975).
Taylor, John. Science and the Supernatural: An Investigation of Paranormal Phenomena (Dutton, 1980).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia—From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery, 1969; Neville
Spearman, 1970).
Wentz, Walter Evans. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, its Psychological Origin and Nature (Oberthur,
Rennes, 1909; Oxford University Press, 1911).
Zusne, Leonard, and Jones, Warren H. Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Extraordinary Phenomena of
Behavior and Experience (Erlbaum, 1982).
Monuments of Mars, The (North Atlantic Books, 1987). Science writer

Richard Hoagland studied the 1976 Viking photos of Mars, depicting a human-
like face in the Cydonia region, and concluded that extraterrestrial colonists
once lived on Mars and created the face, a pyramid, and other huge structures
that were left as reminders of their lost civilization. He believes there may be a
connection between the Cydonia complex and the Giza plateau in Egypt with
its Sphinx and pyramids, which seem to indicate that both ancient Sumer and
Egypt took inspiration and guidance from the Martian builders at Cydonia.
Moody abduction According to Staff Sergeant Charles L. Moody, a crew

chief in the U. S. Air Force, he arrived at his home in Alamogordo, New
Mexico, at about midnight on the evening of August 12, 1975, after working
the swing shift at Holloman Air Force Base. Not feeling tired, he decided to
drive to the outskirts of town to have a quiet smoke and watch for meteors.
After parking for a short period of time, he observed a disk-shaped object drop
from the sky to an elevation estimated to be less than fifty feet, at a distance of
about a hundred yards and moving toward him.
Moody, who was sitting on the hood of his car at the time, panicked and
tried to flee, but his car would not start Then it seemed, he felt a numbness over
his body and watched the object depart. He tried his car again. It started and he
drove home. To his surprise he had lost about one and one half hours’ time. The
following day he complained of a sore back and his wife found the small of his
back to be inflamed. Also, there was a small puncture wound over his spine.
Sketch of disk-shaped craft (according to Moody’s description)
Within a few days he broke out in a rash which covered his trunk from the
midchest to the knees. On reporting to sick call he was sent to William
Beaumont Army Hospital for observation. There he was told he had apparently
received a dose of radiation. Standard treatment for such a problem (deep
enema and laxatives) was administered, and Sergeant Moody was returned to
duty. Over the next two months, states Moody, partial memory of the “lost”
time gradually returned.
He told of finding himself aboard a strange craft, and of a kind of telepathic
communication with aliens who were about four feet eight inches tall, with
large, domed, hairless heads; large eyes; a small slitlike mouth; small ears and
small nose; five digit hands with no nails. They were dressed in plain coveralls
without cuffs or collars. His injuries, said Moody, were the result of a scuffle
when he initially resisted their efforts to take him aboard.
An interesting sidelight of the Moody case is the fact that his records at
William Beaumont Army Hospital disappeared from the files. Doctors and
medics at the hospital remember treating him but cannot provide any clue as to
what happened to the records.
Sergeant Moody was shipped to Europe soon after APRO (the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization) began investigating his case. A PSE
(Psychological Stress Evaluator) test administered (by Charles McQuiston, one
of the instrument’s designers) to Moody’s tape-recorded testimony indicated
that the alleged abductee had reported his experience truthfully.
—L. J. LORENZEN
Aliens as described by Moody
POSTSCRIPT: What follows is Moody’s own testimony as reported to Jim and

Coral Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and published
in the July 1976 issue of The APRO Bulletin:
“The day of the 12th of August 1975 I had heard about a meteor shower that
was to occur the morning of the 13th at 0100 hours. Since I get off work at
2330 hours I thought it might be something to watch that might be interesting
so that night when I got off work I was not tired so I went home, changed my
clothes and watched TV till about 0030 hours. I then got in my car and drove a
short distance from my home to a dirt road on the outskirts of Alamogordo. I
parked my car just off the dirt road, got out and sat on my left front fender. I did
observe 8 or 9 bright meteors. It was now approximately 0115 hours.
“At approximately 0120 hours I observed a dull metallic object that seemed
to just drop out of the sky and started to hover with a wobbling motion
approximately 100 feet in front of me and approximately 10 to 15 feet off the
ground. My first thought was one of fear (I was very frightened). The object
was moving slowly toward my car. I jumped off the fender and got into my car.
I tried to start my car but it was like there was no battery at all and now that I
think about, it the dome light and courtesy lights did not come on when I
opened the door. I cannot understand this. I keep my car in top-notch condition.
“At this time the object stopped dead still as if to just hang there in the air.
The wobbling motion had stopped. It was dead still at approximately 70-80 feet
away and still approximately 15 to 20 feet off the ground. The approximate size
of the object was about 50 feet across and approximately 18 to 20 feet thick at
the center, maybe more. At this time I heard a high-pitched sound, something
like a dental drill might make at high speed and just to the right of the center of
the object I saw what seemed to be an oblong-shaped window. I had not seen
this before. It was approximately 4 to 5 feet long and approximately 2 to 3 feet
wide.
“At the window there were the shadows of what looked to be human forms.
I could not make them out, only that they looked humanoid. There were two or
three of them at the window. At this time the high-pitched sound stopped and a
feeling of numbness came over my body. The fear that I had before left me and
I felt a very peaceful calmness over my body. It was like floating on a cloud. At
this time the object lifted very fast and was gone. It made no sound as it left,
only a slight more glow than before.
“What I will tell you two folks now does not come easy for me but I feel that
you two will be the only ones who will understand. Jim, as I told you over the
phone, I have been remembering some of what took place that night. There was
definitely a contact made. I only wish that someone like you and Coral could
have been there that night. I can tell you that the people of this world have
really misunderstood UFOers and what they are doing. It’s not only just one
advanced race that is studying this planet earth but a group of them and within
three years from now [which was 1979] they will make themselves known to
all mankind. It may be as early as midsummer 1976. I can also say that it will
not be a pleasant type of meeting for there will be warnings made to the people
of this world. Their plan is for only limited contact and after 20 years of further
study and only after deeper consideration will there be any type of closer
contact. They also fear for their own lives and will protect themselves at all
costs. Their intent is a peaceful one and if the leaders of this world will only
heed their warnings we will find ourselves a lot better off than before, and at
this time it’s not up to us to accept them, but for them to accept us!
“My dear friends Jim and Coral, what I saw that night aboard their craft
were things I cannot explain but I can only try. The beings were about 5 feet tall
and very much like us except their heads were larger and no hair, cars very
small, eyes a little larger than ours, nose small and the mouth had very thin lips.
I would say their weight was maybe between 110-130 pounds. There was
speech but their lips did not move. Their type of clothing was skin-tight. I could
not see any zippers or buttons on their clothing at all. The color of their clothes
was black except for one of them that had on a silver-white looking suit. There
were no names said but they knew who I was and called me by my proper name
—Charles, and did not use my nickname, Chuck. It was like they could read
my mind and I believe they did because the elder or leader would speak
sometimes before I would ask something.
“I was taken to a room and the elder or leader touched my back and legs
with a rod-looking device and when I asked what he was doing he said there
had been a scuffle when they first made contact with me and he only wanted to
correct any misplacement that might have happened. I do not remember any
type of scuffle or fight but I do know my back hurt the next day.
“The inside of the craft was as clean as an operating room. I cannot say if
the fixtures were metal or plastic. The lighting was indirect. I did not see any
source of light but there was light. I was .thinking to myself ‘If I could only see
the drive unit of the craft, how wonderful that would be.’ The elder or leader
put his hand on my shoulder and said to follow him. We went to a small room
that had no fixtures in it and was dimly lit and stood on the side of the room.
The floor seemed to give way like an elevator. I guess we went down about 6
feet and what I saw then was a room about 25 feet across and in the center was
what looked like a huge carbon rod going through the roof of the room; around
the rod were what looked like three holes covered with glass. Inside the glass-
covered holes or balls were what looked like large crystals with two rods, one
on each side of the crystal, One rod came to a balllike top, the other one came
to a “T” type top. I was told that this was the drive unit and that I could
understand it if I tried. There were no wires or cables. I then saw what looked
like a large black box on the side of the room. I asked about it and was told
what it was but then was told not to ever reveal what the black box was for. I
have really tried to remember but I can’t remember about the black box, only
that it was there.
“I guess I was there about half an hour looking at the drive unit. it was then
taken back up through the same way we came down—part of the floor just
went up with us. with us. The elder or leader then told me that this was not their
main craft, but only used for observing, and that their main craft was about 400
of our miles above the earth. And the drive unit on it was different from the one
on their craft. I asked if I could go to the main craft and I was told no, that their
time was short but they could find me any time they desired and that in a short
time they would see me again.
“I then asked the elder or leader why I was so sluggish and clumsy, and he
told me that I was quite hostile at the first contact and that they had to use a
type of sound or light on me to calm me down and that the effect would go
away in a short time. The elder or leader then put both his hands on the sides of
my head and told me it was time for them to leave and asked me not to
remember what had been said or what I had seen for at least two weeks. I don’t,
know why the two weeks but I guess there was a reason because it was about
two weeks later that you came to Alamogordo and shortly after that it started
coming back to me—what had happened to me. I asked him if we would meet
again and he said yes, in a short time. And then he told me to be sure and visit a
doctor soon. And I did—I guess there was a reason for that, too. I then asked
why they had talked to me and why was I taken on board their craft. He only
said that in time ‘you will understand’. The next thing I knew I was sitting in
my car watching a strange object lift into the sky and trying to start my car—
the rest you know about.”
—CHARLES L. MOODY
Morel encounter Lyndia Morel was driving home from work (from
Manchester to Goffstown, New Hampshire) when she was allegedy followed
by a UFO and its occupant, which she could see through an oval port hole on
the front of the object. The UFO was described as spherical, with a honey-
combed appearance all over its surface, and was glowing bright yellow.
The UFO encounter scene as described by Lyndia Morel
The episode reportedly began soon after 2:45 A.M. on Friday morning,
November 2, 1973, when Mrs. Morel signed out at the Swedish Sauna in
Manchester where she was employed as a masseuse. She then stopped to have
coffee with a friend, purchased gas for her car, and proceeded home.
After crossing the Merrimack River via Queen City Bridge, Mrs. Morel
proceeded northwest on Mast Road (Route 114A). As she passed the Bi-Wise
Supermarket in Pinardville (outskirts of Manchester), her attention was
attracted to a large, bright, yellow light in the sky to her left and ahead of her.
Resembling a bright star, the object flashed red, green, and blue colors. In fact,
the witness could not tell at this point if it was moving and thought the object
was a planet. After traveling about a mile, Mrs. Morel said she looked at the
object and saw that it was still in the same position but seemed to be brighter.
Approaching the intersection of routes 114A and 114, she lit a cigarette, and
at that moment, as she looked at the object, its light went out. Thinking that was
peculiar for a planet, she entertained the idea for the first time that the object
might be a UFO. However, she was not apprehensive, and after passing the
intersection, the light reappeared in the same spot to the left and ahead of the
car.
The road was dark but up ahead on the right Mrs. Morel said she could see
the lights of the Hillsborough County Nursing Home (the so-called “country
farm”) and across the road, on the left, the lights of Moore General Hospital.
As her car approached the farm, the object’s light went out again.
About a half mile from the nursing home, near the Boston and Maine
Railroad crossing, the light came back on again, perhaps at an even brighter
level. For another two miles the strange object maintained the same appearance
and relationship to the Morel car as before.
On the outskirts of Goffstown (population: 2,300), about where the town’s
streetlights began, the UFO’s light vanished once more and, after about three
quarters of a mile, reappeared for perhaps fifteen seconds. But as Mrs. Morel
veered right around a corner into downtown Goffs town, the light went out and
remained out during the drive of a third of a mile through the lighted downtown
area.
Veering left at the intersection of routes 114 and 13 (near a popcorn stand),
the witness said she was astounded to see the light dead ahead down North
Mast Road (Route 114). The object appeared larger, quite a bit closer, and
lower than before—and positioned as if waiting for her.
She described the object, now, as an orange-and-gold globe completely
covered with a honeycomb design of hexagons except for an oval window of
paler color situated on the upper left portion of the UFO. The witness thought
the object was not totally opaque, but had a peculiar translucent quality about
it. The flashes of red, green, and blue light were rays or beams emanating from
a source in the center; these three colors constantly changed back and forth, as
in the twinkling of a star. A steady, thin, high-pitched whine could be heard,
and, according to the woman, this sound was felt through her body as a tingling
sensation.
Mrs. Morel said her amazement quickly turned to panic when she suddenly
was unable to remove her hands from the steering wheel. Moreover, she
reported that she felt her eyes pulled toward the UFO and had the sensation it
was taking control of her body and drawing her toward it. When later asked
about any possible disturbances to the car’s electrical system, she said she was
not aware of any effects on her automobile’s engine, lights or radio which was
playing at this time.
At no time during this phase of the sighting did the witness recall stopping
her car. However, as she drove forward a “short distance” from the intersection
she said she experienced a “loss of memory” for nearly a half mile. She said
she was unaware of driving a stretch between a church on her right and
Westlawn Cemetery on her left, although she felt her eyes followed the UFO
without interruption. After the experience, she speculated that “they” may have
“retrieved” and “recorded” her memory during this interval.
Suddenly, Mrs. Morel said she realized where she was and became
cognizant that the car was moving at a high rate of speed and that the vehicle
was out of her control. She had the definite impression that the UFO was
pulling her car toward it like a magnet and getting closer. It was at this point
that she noticed the figure in the upper left window of the UFO.
As the car approached a point opposite the middle of the cemetery, the UFO
closed possibly to within less than five hundred feet (perhaps considerably less)
becoming larger than a quarter at arm’s length. At the same time, the object
grew brighter and the whine seemed louder. At this point, Mrs. Morel estimated
the object to be at the height of a three-story building. The figure in the window
was now distinct.
She said the figure’s head, upper body, and arms were visible, while a dark
horizontal surface occupying the lower portion of the oval window obscured
the rest of the body. She thought the humanoid could have been standing at a
control board of some kind. Behind the figure was a white background. The
occupant’s body appeared darker than the face, with small shoulders, but it was
uncertain whether the body was clothed in a uniform or not. The rounded head
was grayish (between a gray and flesh tone), except for a darker color on top,
and the face bore wrinkles or loose skin like an elephant’s hide. Angling
upward across the forehead, two large “egg-shaped” eyes with large dark pupils
gripped the observer’s attention so much that she felt unable to look away. She
said she received an impression or awareness that “told” her “don’t be afraid.”
A mouth-slit turned down at the corners completed the description of the face.
No nose or ears were noticed.
Panic-stricken, Mrs. Morel believed she was in imminent danger of being
captured by the UFO occupant. Passing by the cemetery, she spotted a house
ahead on the left. The globe became so dazzling that she covered her eyes with
an arm and simultaneously turned the wheel with the other hand, entering the
driveway of the Beaudoin house at an angle, and coming to a halt partly on the
front lawn. The witness had covered a distance of almost exactly a mile from
the Route 114/13 intersection, and now she was only three quarters of a mile
from home. Leaving the engine running and the headlights on, Mrs. Morel said
she pushed open the door of the car. At that instant, the Beaudoin’s growling
German shepherd dashed up to the woman as she got out of the car. Normally
afraid of strange dogs, she said she “belted” the animal across the mouth.
Though she did not recall running to the house, she began pounding on the
kitchen door, ringing the bell, and yelling over and over again: “Help me! Help
me! Help me!”
Glancing to her right, she noticed the UFO had shifted its position from west
to north, as if to keep her in view, and was now hovering directly across the
road opposite the Beaudoin house. The object still emitted its high-pitched
whine, which according to Mrs. Morel was becoming almost unbearable.
After what the witness estimated to be about two minutes of attempting to
attract the attention of the residents of the house, the door was opened by Mr.
Beaudoin—as Mrs. Morel began sinking to her knees in almost a faint.
The Beaudoins had been asleep upstairs and reluctantly came down in
response to the persistent noise at the door. Mrs. Beaudoin said an obviously
frightened woman, her eyes wide open with terror, fell into Mr. Beaudoin’s
arms, crying, “Help me! I’m not drunk! I’m not on drugs! A UFO just tried to
pick me up!” Mrs. Beaudoin said the witness was covering her ears but neither
she nor her husband remember hearing an unusual sound. Mrs. Morel said that
the sound ceased and the numbness or tingling sensation she had experienced
vanished after two minutes in the Beaudoin kitchen. However, she became
aware of an afterimage (the effect caused by staring too long at a bright light
source).
The clock on the kitchen wall read 4.30 A.M. Mrs. Beaudoin said the
woman’s story sounded impossible, but she did phone the Goffstown Police
Department and reported the occurrence. Goffstown Patrolman Daniel
Jubinville, 23, received the call while on routine patrol, and proceeded to the
Beaudoin house, arriving there at 4:40 A.M. On his way to the door, the officer
turned off the lights and engine of the Morel car, then heard Mrs. Morel’s
account. In his report he stated: “This writer took note that the subject was
quite shaken up and this writer did not note any evidence of alcohol or drug
influence.”
After Officer Jubinville arrived, the four went outside and spotted an object
whose light seemingly went out when a flashlight was trained on it, and
appeared to move slightly, occasionally changing colors. However, the
multiwitness phase of the sighting should probably be ruled ambiguous and
therefore nonsupportive of the Morel sighting because: (1) the object, as
described by all four observers, matched the appearance and behavior of both
the planet Mars and the UFO (the latter when seen at a distance); and (2) the
planet’s known position was too close to the UFO’s estimated position to
entirely dismiss the planet from contention. Other aspects of the case are, so far,
unconfirmed and rest on the testimony of Mrs. Morel herself.
—WALTER N. WEBB
Morning of the Magicians, The (Editions Gallimard, 1960). French authors
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier pioneer a conspiracy theory of history.
They make a case that the traditions and myths of secret societies, and
mutations in human intelligence throughout history which produced genuises
like Leonardo da Vinci, could be a byproduct of extraterrestrial visitors who
genetically tinkered with human evolution.
Moseley, James W. (b. 1931). Veteran UFO researcher and journalist who is
known as the “court jester” and “Voltaire” of UFOlogy. Having been part of the
American UFO scene for half a century, Moseley keeps UFOlogists on their
toes with his satirical newsletter called Saucer Smear (with the tag line:
“Shockingly Close to the Truth”).
Originally from New York City, Jim Moseley attended Princeton University
for two years. He became interested in UFOs after the famous Kenneth Arnold
sighting in 1947, and more so in 1948, when the Man-tell incident occurred.
In 1954, Moseley founded a magazine called Saucer News, which was
subsequently taken over by Gray Barker in 1968 (publication ceased in 1970).
In 1976, Moseley began publishing Saucer Smear, which he describes as a
“non-scheduled newsletter devoted to humor, satire, and UFOlogical scandal.”
Today, Moseley’s newsletter takes an attitude of benign skepticism toward
the more extreme UFO beliefs, and generally reflects the various ways in which
he has mellowed in his thinking over the years.
Moseley’s archeological interests are also notable. In the late 1950s, he spent
about three years living in Peru, where he succeeded in excavating and
exporting hundreds, if not thousands, of Inca and pre-Inca artifacts, dating as
far back as the pre-Christian era. These are highly artistic objects of ceramic,
wood, silver, and gold.
For several years in the 1980s Moseley was proprietor of a pre-Columbian
art gallery in Key West, where he sold artifacts from Peru and other South
American countries, as well as rare wood carvings from various parts of Africa.
In 1992 he donated his remaining Peruvian material to the Graves Museum of
Archaeology and Natural History, located in Dania, Florida, near Fort
Lauderdale, where they are now on permanent display.
James Moseley
His three books on UFOs are entitled: Jim Moseley’s Book of Saucer News
(1967), The Wright Field Story (1971), and (with Karl Pflock) Shockingly Close
to the Truth (forthcoming in 2002).
P.O. Box 1709,
Address: Key West, FL 33041
U.S.A.
E-mail: slm\@well.com
Web site: www.martiansgohome.com
POSITION STATEMENT: Over the years, my views on the UFO subject have
changed several times. In the early days, I took what might be called a NICAP
(National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) position, in that I
believed saucers were extraterrestrial, but that the contactees were basically
lying. Later I flirted, for a time, with the theory that UFOs were secret weapons.
By the early 1960s, I was back with the extraterrestrial theory.
In the seventies, I became greatly influenced by UFO writers, such as John
Keel, Peter Kor, Allen Greenfield, et al., who propounded one version or
another of what might be called a “4-D” (fourth dimensional) interpretation. I
still feel that UFOS, as well as most “psychic” events, are manifestations of
some sort from another realm or dimension. They may have a degree of
physical reality, but they are beyond our present science and present powers of
human comprehension.
Although I disagreed strongly with NICAP’s effort to blame everything on
the Air Force, I now believe that there is a governmental cover-up—whether
deliberate or not remains to be seen—which has prevented the public from
taking UFOs as seriously as they should. Were the public to realize that UFOs
are a serious and continuing problem, governmental funds (in the millions)
could be devoted to scientific attempts to solve the mystery properly; and
eventually, with enough money, and given our present level of technology,
some progress in that direction would be inevitable.
As things stand now, the field is still largely inhabited by amateurs,
including teenaged hobbyists, cultists, and disturbed people of all sorts. In
recent years, however, a few “real” scientists have taken a serious interest in
UFOs and have been willing to say so publicly, which is a good trend.
However, their pro-UFO bias largely invalidates their work.
Today, whereas most UFOlogists still prefer 3-D “nuts and bolts” saucers
and space people, I prefer 3 -D, 4-D, or 4 -D entities. Also, while some
others believe that our visitors were around for a few years and then went away,
I feel rather that, whatever this phenomenon is, it has been a permanent part of
the Earth’s environment at least since the dawn of recorded history, and remains
here now.
My skepticism is caused by the fact that our supposed visitors are just too
much like us—physically, emotionally, and intellectually. They never seem to
tell us anything we don’t already know. Their technology is only a very few
years ahead of our own.
Granted that intelligent life probably exists throughout the universe, it is still
a weird coincidence indeed that we are being visited by creatures who are
almost precisely at our own stage of evolution. If they were a little less
developed, they couldn’t get here at all, and if they were much more developed,
we might not even recognize them as intelligent life forms. After all, evolution
has been going on for billions of years and hopefully will continue for a few
billion years more!
It is absurd to believe that a highly developed race would engage in silly
genetic and sexual experiments with Earthlings. These creatures seem to be
obsessed with sex—just as we are! Abductions apparently have some sort of
reality, but it is definitely not a 3-D physical reality. Just what is involved, we
do not know.
What is really happening, in my opinion, is that we are having occasional
contacts with another realm of being—another dimension, or whatever. There is
a vast spectrum of weirdness that includes saucers as well as the paranormal.
One cannot be separated from the other, as tempting as it might be to do so. The
reality behind the saucers is the ultimate reality behind science and religion. At
our present stage of knowledge, we cannot understand it all well, but hopefully
someday we will.
—JAMES W. MOSELEY
Mothman A manlike flying creature with glowing red hypnotic eyes, a

wingspread of ten feet and a predilection for chasing automobiles at speeds
approaching a hundred miles per hour, Mothman terrorized residents of the
Point Pleasant, West Virginia, area during 1966-67. Several witnesses were
interviewed by various UFO investigators, including John Keel and the writer,
who wrote their findings in two different books. A television newsman gave the
nickname “Mothman” to the phenomenon, no doubt inspired by the TV
program, “Batman.” Like the term, “flying saucer,” the satirical apellation
became permanently attached, both to the Point Pleasant sightings and to such
phenomena as a class. As with many other strange-creature reports, such as
“Bigfoot,” and seemingly allied events such as visitations by “men in black,”
many witnesses and investigators believed there was a connection between
Mothman and the numerous UFO sightings in the area at the same time. Later,
some witnesses, investigators, and area residents would believe the phenomena
represented a portent of the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge on December
16, 1967. These beliefs, blended with a tradition that Cornstalk, an Indian chief,
had placed a curse on the town, tended to adapt Mothman to the folklore of the
area.
Despite the mythlike quality of the occurrences when considered ten years
afterward, two books, this writer’s The Silver Bridge (1970) and Keel’s The
Mothman Prophecies (1975), record interviews with eyewitnesses and
otherwise substantiate the events.
The best-documented sighting of Mothman involved four witnesses and
occurred on November 17, 1966. Two newly married couples, Roger and Linda
Scarberry and Steve and Mary Mallette, were driving together in the “TNT”
area, an abandoned World War II munitions manufacturing-storage complex,
when they encountered a frightening six-foot figure, with wings and glowing
red eyes, emerging from behind an abandoned power plant.
“It was more or less running,” Mallette reported, “trying to balance itself
with its wings which spread slightly outward. It staggered like a crippled
chicken as it disappeared around the corner of the building.”
The party fled homeward toward Point Pleasant, but believed Mothman was
following them. Suddenly, as they rounded a sharp curve, they saw the creature
standing near the highway on a hillside. Instead of flapping its huge wings, it
took off vertically, shooting upward like a rocket at great speed, but without
visible means of propulsion. As they continued speeding homeward they could
see the shadow of the creature, cast by the moon, still following them, even
though they were driving at almost a hundred miles per hour.
An artist’s rendering of the “Mothman”

(Drawn by Hal Crawford)
When city police responded to their report and drove to the “TNT” area,
they found no evidence, though they reported unusual radio interference, ”like
high-pitched beeping sounds.
This dramatic report might be written off as just a horror story, were it not
for several other
independent sightings of the same phenomenon. On November 25, Tom Ury, a
shoe-store manager, was driving north of Point Pleasant on Route 62, when he
saw what he thought to be a helicopter rising from a wooded area several
hundred yards from the road. As the object approached him, he perceived it to be
a huge bird, of grayish-brown color, six feet in length, and with a wingspread of
at least ten feet. Fearing it would attack his convertible, he accelerated to seventy
miles per hour. It followed him for about a mile, then veered off and flew away.
Although largely confined to the Point Pleasant area, one sighting was
reported fifty miles away in Charleston.
On November 26, Mrs. Ruth Foster, watching for her husband to arrive
home from a late evening work shift, peered through a window in her front
door and was horrified to meet the gaze of two huge bulbous red eyes staring
back at her. She noted a white body with what she termed “close feathers,”
standing almost six feet tall. A huge set of folded wings and a “peculiar face”
were the only other details she could recall. During the following evening, a
thirteen-year-old neighbor, Shelia Cain, along with a friend, saw a “gray-and-
white-looking” birdlike creature while passing an auto junkyard. It, too,
displayed glowing eyes, a common denominator of most of the sightings. The
glowing eyes generally were the only facial features described by witnesses—
neither a head nor beak are mentioned.
Another incident, about one hundred miles away, may also be connected.
During the evening of November 15, Newell Partridge, who lived near Wallace,
noted interference on his television set, and at the same time heard his German
shepherd dog, “Bandit,” howling. He went outside and directed his flashlight
toward the barn where the beam picked up glowing red eyes, “like bicycle
reflectors.” The dog charged toward the eyes, but did not return to the house.
The next morning Partridge tracked Bandit to the barn where the dog’s
footprints in the soft mud went into a circle as if he were baying some animal.
But the footprints did not leave the circle, and when Partridge heard about the
Point Pleasant incidents, he believed Mothman had snatched up and carried off
his pet.
Within a framework of UFOlogical theory advanced by Keel, along with
Jerome Clark, writing with Loren Coleman in The Unidentified and Creatures
From the Outer Edge (1975 and 1978 respectively), the Point Pleasant
sightings take on a “classic” pattern. Even the “men in black” appeared shortly
after the initial Mothman and UFO sightings. Mary Hyre, a newspaper reporter,
recounted how mysterious, oddly dressed visitors showed up at her office,
inquiring about various investigators who had interviewed witnesses. Keel
believes that certain locations may represent “window” areas, where, at certain
times, massive unexplained phenomena of various kinds may occur. This could
include the experience of Wood-row Derenberger, who, driving near
Parkersburg about fifty miles north of Point Pleasant), claimed his van was
forced off the road on the evening of November 2, that a UFO landed, and an
OCCUPANT named “Indrid Cold” emerged from it to assure him that “We
mean you no harm.”
There are two natural explanations suggested for Mothman. George Wolfe,
Jr., of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, reported that, while hunting during the
Thanksgiving weekend, he had seen a “seven-foot-tall bird that looked
something like an ostrich.” Could Mothman have been a migratory bird,
temporarily grounded from its travels? Dr. Robert L. Smith speculated the
creature could have been a sandhill crane, the second largest American crane.
“It stands almost as tall as a man, with its feathers a slate gray,” the scientist
stated. Large, bright red fleshy rings around the crane’s eyes could have been
mistaken for the red “hypnotic” eyes reported by witnesses. But its appearance
in West Virginia during the winter was difficult to explain: Smith noted it
winters in a warm climate and is rarely seen east of the Mississippi, except in
Florida.
Despite their bizarre attributes, the Point Pleasant Mothman sightings are not
unique. Ten years later, residents of the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, would report
a “flap” of unidentified flying creatures, which television newsmen of a later
programming decade would call “Big Bird” Jerome Clark documents many
“Big Bird” sightings in his article,” Unidentified Flapping Objects” in Oui
magazine, October 1976, including an account of the creature’s allegedly
attacking a witness. In Texas, like West Virginia, ornithologists tried to identify
the phenomena with questionable success.
“Mothmen” and other mystery “animals” are interesting to UFOlogists because
they are connected, either in origin, or by popular mythmaking, with the “flying
saucer” phenomena.
—GRAY BARKER
Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) The Midwest UFO Network was founded
on May 31, 1969. Retaining the acronym MUFON, the name was changed on
June 17, 1973, to the Mutual UFO Network, Inc., to reflect the worldwide
scope of the organization.
MUFON is governed by a board of directors, composed of twenty-two men
and women, which includes the corporate officers, four elected regional
directors, and the directors of the major functional departments. In North
America, each state or province is headed by a state or provincial director. Each
state is geographically divided into groups of counties with a state section
director correlating the investigative activities of the field investigators.
At the worldwide level, the international coordinator, assisted by the
continental coordinators, provide the liaison between MUFON and the national
directors or foreign representatives in each nation. Since the field investigators
comprise such an important segment of MUFON, the fourth edition of the
copyrighted MUFON Field Investigator’s Manual edited by Walter H. Andrus,
Jr., was released in 1995 and has been adopted by the English-speaking nations
as a universal guide.
On July 16, 2000, founding member and veteran UFOlogist, John F.
Schuessler became the International Director of MUFON, replacing Walter H.
Andrus, Jr., who headed the organization for 30 years.
The objective of MUFON is to resolve the UFO mystery and all of its
ramifications in a scientific manner. MUFON is dedicated to the express
purpose of answering four basic questions pertaining to this enigma:
(1) Are UFOs some form of spacecraft controlled by an advanced

intelligence conducting a surveillance of Earth, or do they constitute some
unknown physical or psychological manifestation that is not understood by
twentieth-century science?
(2) If UFOs are found to be extraterrestrial craft controlled by intelligent
beings, what is their method of propulsion, or if they have the technique to
operate in another dimension, how is this accomplished?
(3) Postulating that they may be controlled by an extraterrestrial intelligence,
where do they originate-in our universe or in another dimension?
(4) Assuming that some of the craft are piloted by beings, what can we learn
from their apparently advanced science and civilization that could benefit
mankind on the planet Earth?
Since 1970, one of the major activities of MUFON has been the sponsorship
of an annual MUFON International UFO symposium, where internationally
known scientists, engineers, researchers, and authors lectured on their particular
specialization or contribution to resolving this perplexing scientific dilemma. In
order to provide a permanent record of the presentations, the copyrighted
proceeding’s are published annually for worldwide distribution.
The official monthly publication of the Mutual UFO Network is the
MUFON UFO Journal formerly entitled Skylook and founded in 1967. Dwight
Connelly is the present editor.
P.O. Box 369

Address: Morrison, CO 80465
U.S.A.
Telephone: (303) 932-7701

Fax: (303) 932-9279
Web site: www.mufon.com

E-mail: mufonhq@aol.com
Mysteries of Time and Space (Prentice-Hall, 1974) Brad Steiger thinks that
alien visitors mold space and time so the human mind can perceive poltergeists,
Sasquatch, and other unusual phenomena. They are intentionally confounding
human notions of reality as a teaching method, tuning our minds to other
dimensions and the intelligences that reside within them.
N
NASA Fact Sheet on UFOs The official U.S. Government position on

unidentified flying objects and possible alien visitors is quoted here (verbatim)
from a “Fact Sheet” published by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (dated May 17, 2000). The Fact Sheet is entitled “The US
Government and Unidentified Flying Objects.”
No branch of the United States Government is currently involved with or

responsible for investigations into the possibility of alien life on other planets
or for investigating Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s). The US Air Force
(USAF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have
had intermittent, independent investigations of the possibility of alien life on
other planets; however, none of these has produced factual evidence that life
exists on other planets, nor that UFO’s are related to aliens. From 1947 to 1969,
the Air Force investigated UFO’s; then in 1977, NASA was asked to examine
the possibility of resuming UFO investigations. After studying all of the facts
available, it was determined that nothing would be gained by further
investigation, since there was an absence of tangible evidence.
In October 1992, NASA was directed by Congress to begin a detailed search
for artificial radio signals from other civilizations under the NASA Towards
Other Planetary Systems (TOPS)/High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS)
program (also known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project).
Congress directed NASA to end this project in October 1993, citing pressures
on the US Federal budget. The HRMS did not detect any confirmed signal
before it was stopped. However, similar work will continue in a more limited
manner through efforts of private groups and through academic institutions.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI Institute) in
Mountain View, CA, effectively replaced the Government project, borrowing
the signal processing system from NASA. The SETI Institute is a nonprofit
corporation conducting research in a number of fields including all science and
technology aspects of astronomy and planetary sciences, chemical evolution,
the origin of life, biological evolution, and cultural evolution.
During several space missions, NASA astronauts have reported phenomena

not immediately explainable; however, in every instance NASA determined that
the observations could not be termed “abnormal” in the space environment. The
1947 to 1969 USAF investigations studied UFO’s under Project Blue Book.
The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was
terminated December 17, 1969. Of the total of 12,618 sightings reported to
Project Blue Book, 701 remain “unidentified.”
The decision to discontinue UFO investigations was based on an evaluation
of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled, “Scientific Study of
Unidentified Flying Objects;” a review of the University of Colorado’s report
by the National Academy of Sciences; previous UFO studies; and Air Force
experience investigating UFO reports during the 1940’s, ‘50’s and ‘60’s. As a
result of experience, investigations, and studies since 1948, the conclusions of
Project Blue Book were: (1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by
the Air Force was ever a threat to our national security; (2) there was no
evidence submitted to, or discovered by, the Air Force that sightings
categorized as “unidentified” represented technological developments or
principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and (3) there was
no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” were
extraterrestrial vehicles.
With the termination of Project Blue Book, the USAF regulation
establishing and controlling the program for investigating and analyzing UFO’s
was rescinded. Documentation regarding the former Project Blue Book
investigation was permanently transferred to the Modern Military Branch,
National Archives and Records Service, in Washington, DC 20408, and is
available for public review and analysis.
Since the termination of Project Blue Book, nothing has occurred that would
support a resumption of UFO investigations by the USAF or NASA. Given the
current environment of steadily decreasing defense and space budgets, it is
unlikely that the Air Force or NASA will become involved in this type of costly
project in the foreseeable future.
Since neither NASA nor the Air Force is engaged in day-to-day UFO
research, neither one reviews UFO-related articles intended for publication,
evaluates UFO-type spacecraft drawings, or accepts accounts of UFO sightings
or applications for employment in the field of aerial phenomena investigation.
UFO POINTS OF CONTACT
1. For further information on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, please

contact the SETI Institute, 2035 Landings Drive, Mountain View, CA
94043, (415) 960-4530.
2. News media requiring Project Blue Book files should contact the National
Archives Public Affairs Office, (202) 501-5525. Public queries should be
addressed to the Project Blue Book archivist at (202) 501-5385. For queries
not related to Project Blue Book, contact the National Archives receptionist
at (202) 501-5400. Documentation is available from: Modern Military
Branch, National Archives and Records Service, Eighth Street and
Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20408.
3. The Air Force publication, “The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the
New Mexico Desert,” a lengthy document providing all of the details
available from the Air Force on the Roswell incident, is available for $52
from the US Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents,
Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328.
4. There are a number of universities and professional scientific organizations
that have considered UFO phenomena during periodic meetings and
seminars. A list of private organizations interested in aerial phenomena may
be found in Gale’s Encyclopedia of Associations.
5. Persons wishing to report UFO sightings are advised to contact law
enforcement agencies.
—NASA
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP)

NICAP was founded in October 1956 by a former Navy scientist, Townsend
Brown, and a small group of Washington, D.C., area professional men. Initially
it planned to publish a slick magazine and to have an elaborate and costly staff
structure, but this failed to materialize. With the support of retired Admiral
Delmer S. Fahmey and other prominent figures, Major Donald E. Keyhoe,
USMC, Ret., became director in January 1957 and established a more realistic
operating plan. NICAP flourished between 1957 and 1970, attaining a
membership of over ten thousand, then began a slow decline. John L. Acuff, an
entrepreneur of small associations, became director/president in 1973. During
the 1950s, NICAP established itself, through national news media publicity, as
a research organization willing to accept UFO reports in confidence from
pilots, military personnel, and others in sensitive positions. Scientists,
engineers, and other technically trained persons were encouraged to participate
in UFO investigations. Beginning in 1958, a national network of investigators
was established; these “subcommittees” included operational units at major
scientific and military establishments. Active members also formed affiliates in
Chicago, Connecticut, Kentucky, Los Angeles, and New York City.
Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, the affiliate/subcommittee network
funneled information into the Washington, D.C., headquarters office which was
maintained for over fifteen years. (Mr. Acuff later moved the office to the
Maryland suburbs.) NICAP used the information to dispute Air Force
contentions that UFO sightings were being explained adequately and to keep
government officials apprised of important sightings by reputable and
competent observers. Information also was supplied to interested members of
Congress and congressional staffs, and NICAP repeatedly recommended that
congressional hearings be held to illuminate the UFO question.
In 1964 NICAP published The UFO Evidence, edited by Richard Hall. This
200,000-word documentary report was supplied to every member of Congress
and to local and national news media.
NICAP collaborated with the University of Colorado UFO Project, but early
in 1968 it broke off its formerly close relations, alleging that its director, Dr.
Edward Condon was prejudging UFOs by making negative and skeptical public
statements and that the project was ignoring hundreds of important cases. When
it became clear that the project’s report would be negative, NICAP devoted its
resources to countering the report and offsetting its presumed detrimental effect
on UFO investigations. The supplying of large amounts of information in the
form of photostatic copies and the publishing of additional reports (UFOs: A
New Look and Strange Effects from UFOs, both in 1969) depleted NICAP’s
finances. This, coupled with a decline of public interest in the wake of the
Condon Report led to the organization’s decline.
The NICAP board, in 1970, relieved Major Keyhoe as director (he continued
to serve as a board member) and appointed John L. Acuff. As manager of
several small associations, Mr. Acuff was charged with reorganizing NICAP on
a businesslike basis. The scale of operations was drastically reduced, costs were
cut, but NICAP continued to publish a newsletter, The UFO Investigator. The
membership continued to decline, however, and the NICAP budget for research
and investigation was minuscule. Mr. Acuff resigned as president in 1978 but
accepted a position on the board. The new president in 1979 was Alan N. Hall.
As of early 1979, NICAP was engaged in an attempt at fundamental
reorganization and was considering a merger with one or more other UFO
groups. A controversy arose concerning the alleged CIA connections of several
then-current board members. The membership was stated to be about two
thousand.
By 1980 NICAP became inoperative and its files were given to the J. Allen
Hynek Center for UFO Studies.
—RICHARD HALL
Nazca “spaceport” Thought by some to be an ancient landing site for

extraterrestrials, the Nazca plain is located in a desert near the southern coast of
Peru, and occupies an area of at least forty square miles.
Though built by the pre-Inca Nazca civilization (ca. 200 B.C. - 600 A.D.), the
immense lines and figures received little attention until the German-American
mathematician and amateur archaeologist Maria Reiche decided to devote her
life to studying them.
Beginning in the 1940s until her recent death, Ms. Reiche roamed the lines
with a jeep and a 10-foot stepladder, mapping them in painstaking detail. Her
work was not generally known in the United States until a 1955 article in Fate
magazine by the writer. Later, Erich Von Däniken and other writers popularized
the lines, because of their superficial resemblance to a giant airport or landing
field, giving rise to speculation that they were intended to be seen by the
occupants of flying saucers.
The lines represent an important engineering feat only because of their great
length, running as long as several miles each, and because of their absolute
straightness. Most are almost parallel to each other, and in a few cases as many
as a dozen of them intersect at small artificial mounds. Treasure hunters in the
1950s were unable to find anything of value in these mounds.
Mingled among the lines are large figures of various animals, very similar to
the animal designs on the ancient Nazca pottery that is still found in tombs in
the valleys near this coastal desert.
These figures, like the straight lines themselves, were made quite simply by
clearing away the reddish topsoil of the desert, exposing the white sand beneath
it. Since there is virtually no rain at all in the area, these markings on the desert
lasted intact for all these many hundreds of years.
Much nonsense has been written on this subject. There is no question as to
who made the lines, or how they were made. The only mystery is in regard to
why. Since the ancient people of Peru (and elsewhere in South America) had no
written language, we will never know for sure. Maria Reiche and other serious
researchers suggest an astronomical explanation, and this most likely is correct.
The Nazca lines were apparently an attempt to correlate with the most
visible stars and planets in the sky. Over the entries the apparent positions of
these heavenly bodies kept shifting slightly; thus the fact that so many of the
lines are nearly parallel, but not quite.
A pilot’s-eye view of the Nazca “spaceport”
Legend has it that these lines can be seen only from the air. Whereas the
entire area can only be seen at once from an airplane, significant portions can
be seen from Ms. Reich’s 10-foot ladder, or from low hills that surround the
Nazca plain. As usual, reality is less exciting than myth.
Little known is the fact that very similar but less complex patterns of lines
have been found hundreds of miles away near Lima, the Peruvian capital, as
well as in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, and possibly other countries of South
America. Their purpose is not clear.
—JAMES W. MOSELEY
ANOTHER VIEW: Across 30 miles of gravel-covered desert near the southern

coast of Peru are the famed Nazca lines and effigies. The latter—figures of
animals and birds, including a 440-foot-long “condor”—are so large that they
can effectively be seen only from the air. In his Chariots of the Gods? (1970),
Erich von Däniken speculated that the drawings were “signals” to
extraterrestrials and the wider lines “landing strips” for alien spacecraft. He
suggested that the figures could have been “built according to instructions from
an aircraft.”
A giant Condor on the Nazca plain. The line running parallel with the wings is a solstice line.
However, the late Maria Reiche who devoted her life to mapping and
preserving the markings, observed that the imagined runways were on soft
ground, commenting, “I’m afraid the spacemen would have gotten stuck”
(McIntyre, 1975). And when von Däniken exhibited a photo of one Nazca
configuration “very reminiscent of the aircraft parking areas in a modern
airport,” he failed to tell his readers that it was a cropped view of the knee joint
of one of the bird figures.
In fact, everywhere there is evidence that the lines were made by the local
Nazca Indian culture which flourished in the area from about 200 B.C. to A.D.
600. One of the wooden stakes found at the termination of some of the long
lines was actually carbon-dated to A.D. 525 (plus or minus 80 years), and the
stylized Nazcan figures bear striking similarity to those of other Nazcan art.
Nazcan pottery is also found in association with the lines, and their graves and
ruins of their settlements lie nearby.
Aerial photograph of full-scale Condor drawing made by Joe Nickell (and helpers) in eastern
Kentucky
Why the markings were made remains a mystery, although various

hypotheses have been offered, ranging from von Däniken’s “ancient astronauts”
notion to the idea that they represented a giant astronomical calendar or some
form of offerings to the Indian deities or even the path of a ritual maze. The
outlines of the figures were made by removing surface gravel to expose the
lighter soil underneath (Isbell, 1978, 1980; McIntyre, 1975).
Exactly how the Nazcans made such ruler-straight lines and giant drawings,
so large their creators could not effectively view them, is another mystery.
Some writers have exaggerated the difficulty, and even Maria Reiche in her
book Mystery on the Desert (1976) went so far as to say, “Ancient Peruvians
must have had instruments and equipment which we ignore and which together
with ancient knowledge were buried and hidden from the eyes of the
conquerors as the one treasure which was not to be surrendered.”
However, no such special equipment has ever turned up, and indeed need
not be assumed. It has been shown that straight lines could be constructed over
many miles by using a simple series of ranging poles. As to the figures, one
suggestion was the use of a grid-system by which a small drawing would be
enlarged square by square onto a large grid (Isbell, 1980). However, such a
technique seems not to account for the asymmetry of some figures.
In 1982 with five helpers I reproduced the giant “Condor” on an eastern
Kentucky landfill using only sticks and string. We laid out a center line on the
ground and plotted the coordinates of significant points. (On the small drawing
we would measure along its center line from one end to a point on the line
opposite the point to be plotted—say a wing tip. Next we measured the distance
from the center line to that point. We then repeated the process on the ground,
using larger units of measurement. We employed a T-shaped device to keep the
sightings at right angles to the center line. We plotted 165 points (temporarily
marked with stakes) which we later smoothly connected (using white lime in
the manner of marking a playing field) to produce the figure. We then
photographed it from an airplane at nearly 1,000 feet. (Nickell, 1982).
Our method was so accurate that we reproduced flaws in the original target
figure, suggesting that the Nazcans probably used a simplified form of this
method, with perhaps a significant amount of the work being done freehand.
The results demonstrated that extraterrestrials need not be invoked to explain
the Nazca lines.
—JOE NICKELL
References
Isbell, William H. “The Prehistoric Ground Drawings of Peru,” Scientific American (October, 1978).
———. “Solving the Mystery of Nazca,” Fate (October 1980).)
McIntyre, Loren. “Mystery of the Ancient Nazca Lines,” National Geographic (May 1975).
Morrison, Tony. Pathways to the Gods (Harper & Row, 1978).
Nickell, Joe. “The Nazca Drawings Revisited: Creation of a Full-Sized Duplicate,” Skeptical Inquirer
(Spring 1983).
Reiche, Maria.. Mystery on the Desert, revised ed. (Privately published, 1976).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
POSTSCRIPT: First discovered in 1927 (by Toribio Mexta Xessepe, a member

of a Peruvian aerial survey team), the Nazca markings cover about a 330-square-
mile area of desert that became a gigantic drawing board for its ancient
inhabitants. There, discernible only from an elevated vantage point, are found
enormous straight lines, trapezoids, triangles, spirals, and the outlines of
animals: birds, fish, lizards, a spider, and a monkey. There are something like
13,000 lines, 100 spirals, trapezoids and triangles, and nearly 800 huge animal
drawings. The markings, made between 400 B.C. and A.D. 900, were etched
into the desert floor by removing the surface stones to expose the lighter subsoil
underneath.
To von Däniken, the geometric designs looked like landing strips, probably
for interplanetary spacecraft. Again, as in most other cases of his alleged
evidence for the space-god theory, the original idea was not his own. (The
“spaceport” interpretation had been offered earlier by George Hunt Williamson
in his 1959 book Road in the Sky as a complete chapter entitled “Beacons for
the Gods.”)
Von Däniken popularized the idea with the following suggestion made in
Chariots of the Gods? (1970):
“If you fly over this territory—the plain of Nazca—you can make out
gigantic lines, laid out geometrically, some of which run parallel to each
other, while others intersect or are surrounded by large trapezoidal areas.
The archaeologists say that they are Inca roads. A preposterous idea! Of
what use to the Incas were roads that ran parallel to each other? That
intersected? That were laid out in a plain and came to a sudden end?…
Seen from the air, the clear-cut impression that the 37-mile-long plain of
Nazca made on me [italics in the original] was that of an airfield!
Then, a year later, von Däniken became more bold and stated his theory
matter-offactly in Gods from Outer Space (1971): “At some time in the past,
unknown intelligences landed on the uninhabited plain near the present-day
town of Nazca and build an improvised airfield for their spacecraft which were
to operate in the vicinity of the earth.”
While previous authors of the ancient-airfield theory are easily found in the
popular literature of the 1950s and 1960s, it is not so easy to find references to
any archaeologists who ever seriously considered the Nazca lines as Inca roads.
In fact, the first archaeologist to investigate the lines, the late Paul Kosok of
Long Island University, ruled out this possibility in his first article on the
subject, published in 1947. In his preliminary report, entitled “The Mysterious
Markings of Nazca,” Kosok pointed out that although the present inhabitants of
the Nazca area sometimes referred to the markings as Inca Roads, “their very
nature, size, and position indicate that they could never have been used for
ordinary purposes of transportation.”
Dr. Kosok was the first to investigate the strange desert markings. In 1939,
while studying ancient irrigation systems on the coast of Peru, he noticed that
one of the lines coincided with the point on the horizon where the sun set on the
day of the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere (i.e., the shortest day of
the year). This discovery led Kosok to theorize that the lines represented a
gigantic astronomical calendar.
A brief study of the lines was reported in 1973 by astronomer Gerald
Hawkins of Boston University in his book Beyond Stonehenge. After making
computer calculations of significant alignments of a selected number of lines at
different dates in the ancient past, Hawkins concluded that the solar, lunar, and
stellar alignments were no better than what would be expected by chance. But
mathematician Maria Reiche, who had studied the Nazca lines for decades,
supported the calendar theory; and at least one American astronomer, William
Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, partially agrees
with her.
Stars making up the southern-sky constellation Pavo, the Peacock, superimposed on the outline
of a giant bird, identified as a Condor, depicted on the Nazca plain.
Hartmann suggests that the lines may not represent a single undertaking at
one particular point in time. When Hawkins fed into the computer the question:
“What stars did the lines point to at any date between 5000 B.C. and A.D.
1900?” he says, “The print-out sheets were full, stars at the end of each line.
But Hawkins rejects the significance of this finding, because he requires that
the lines “hang together” in any given century; that is, for each century
investigated, the number of alignments should be more than would be expected
by chance for the number of lines, or directions, tested. Furthermore, Hawkins’
study was not geared to detect other kinds of alignments, such as how the
shadows of certain hills and ridges, marked by the lines, might also prove to be
significant.
It is interesting that certain of the animal figures laid out on the Nazca plain
almost perfectly coincide with some of the ancient constellations over the
Southern Hemisphere. The drawing following this paragraph shows the
constellation of Pavo, the Peacock, superimposed on the outline of a bird,
identified as a condor, “drawn” on the plain. The stars fit the condor in much
the same manner as the northern star patterns line up with their mythical
counterparts. Perhaps the Nazca figures were representations of constellations
recognized at the time. This hypothesis supports Maria Reiche’s suggestion that
the large figures were drawn from reduced models; the models might have been
the star patterns that form the outlines of the subjects represented.
The fact that the Nazca configurations are seen only from the air is
consistent with the ancient desire that the gods in the sky notice the peoples
below. And what would make the people more noticeable to them (at a time
without electric lights or radio signals) than giant pictorial representations of
certain forms of life indigenous to their own particular region of the Earth?
Even von Däniken admits that the ancients already worshipped the Sun and the
Moon before “the gods [came] down from heaven.”
Whether these mysterious markings represent constellations, ceremonial
pathways, an astronomical calendar, or something quite different, we do not
know. But one thing is fairly certain, and that is the absurdity of the ancient-
airfield theory.
In both The Space-Gods Revealed (1976) and Guardians of the Universe?
(1980), I gave reasons why the lines were probably not ancient landing strips,
namely that: (1) there simply would be no need for a runway, several miles
long, to accommodate a space vehicle that should be capable of a vertical
landing, and (2) the soft, sandy soil would not be a suitable surface for any kind
of heavy vehicle to land on.
Another version of the spaceport theory maintains that the exhaust from
hovering spacecraft was responsible for blowing away the sand and thus
creating the lines. Again, a nice try, but this idea would seem to prove just the
opposite of what its proponents intend. It is not the lightweight soil that was
removed to create the lines, but rather the heavier rocks, that are actually
stacked in linear piles all along the borders of the lines and figures.
What then, could have been the purpose of such an enormous array of lines,
shapes, and animal figures created more than a thousand years ago?
When Professor Paul Kosok of Long Island University first studied the lines,
his most significant finding came not from his aerial surveys, but while he was
standing on the ground gazing down one of the lines towards the setting sun on
June 22, 1941. This happened to be the day of the winter solstice in the
Southern Hemisphere; and the apparent alignment gave Kosok a startling idea:
perhaps the lines represented “the largest astronomy book in the world.” He
later confirmed more than a dozen such alignments, some for the solstices and
others for the equinoxes, indicating that the Nazca “'landing field” very likely
comprised a gigantic astronomical calendar and observatory. It has been found
also that several of the large animal drawings have solstice lines associated
with them. After all, how would the Nazcans be able to recognize which lines
were which, if they had not devised some reference system by which to find
them later?
Von Däniken and some others have rejected the Nazca calendar theory
because, they say, not all of the lines have been shown to be astronomically
oriented. We must realize, however, that this does not negate the fact of the
many solstice lines that have been discovered. These also “happen” to be
special lines marked prominently by certain bird, spider, and other animal
figures.
The fact that most of the lines on the Nazca plain radiate from central
mounds also appears significant, and fits logically the theory that they were
used as sight lines. Considering all the evidence, it seems likely that the Nazca
markings were of astrological and astronomical significance.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Hawkins, Gerald S. Beyond Stonehenge (Harper & Row, 1973).
Kosok, Paul. Life, Land and Water in Ancient Peru (Long Island University Press, 1965).
Kosok, Paul, and Maria Reiche. “The Mysterious Markings of Nazca,” Natural History (May 1947).
———. “Ancient Drawings on the Desert of Peru,” Archaeology (December 1949).
McIntyre, Loren. “Mystery of the Ancient Nazca Lines,” National Geographic (May 1975).
Morrison, Tony. Pathways to the Gods (Harper & Row, 1978).
Reiche, Maria. Mystery on the Desert (Privately published, 1968).
Story, Ronald. The Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row, 1976; New English Library, 1977).
———. Guardians of the Universe? (New English Library/St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
———. Chariots of the Gods? (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
———. Gods from Outer Space (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971).
Williamson, George Hunt. Road in the Sky (Neville Spearman, 1959).
NDE (near-death-experience) This term is used to indicate an experience of

conscious separation from the physical body under circumstances approaching
the death and dying process. It is often associated with spiritual and
transcendent visions, insights, and meetings with benevolent ET beings.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
NICAP See NATIONAL INVESTIGATIONS COMMITTEE ON AERIAL PHENOMENA.
Nickell, Joe (b. 1944). Dr. Nickell is a Senior Research Fellow of the
(CSICOP). A full-time paranormal investigator, he has been called “the real-life
Scully” (after the skeptical character in The X-Files). He worked professionally
as a stage magician, private investigator, and journalist before returning to the
University of Kentucky (1980–1995) to teach technical writing and to obtain a
Ph.D. in English.
Joe Nickell
His articles have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including

International UFO Reporter—and he has authored (or co-authored or edited)
sixteen books, including Entities (1995) and The UFO Invasion (1997). He has
also appeared on numerous radio and television shows.
His contributions to UFOlogy including research relating to crop circles, the
Nazca lines, the cultural evolution of the familiar humanoid-type
extraterrestrial, and the experiences of alien abductees (seen primarily as
“waking dreams” and hypnotic fantasies).
c/o CSICOP
P.O. Box 703
Address:
Amherst, NY 14226
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: Since the modern wave of UFO reports began in
1947, an elaborate extraterrestrial mythos has developed. Like other
mythologies, it features supernormal beings interacting with humans and has
implications to man’s origins and place in the universe. Thus far a great quantity
of evidence has accumulated relating to alien visitation, but it is unfortunately of
very poor quality, consisting of dubious physical evidence and anecdotal reports
that, when investigated, typically prove to be due to misperceptions and hoaxes.
Nevertheless, there remains a residue of unexplained cases which
proponents and skeptics interpret quite differently. Proponents treat the residual
cases as if—simply by being unsolved—they infer a paranormal cause. But that
is, at best, a logical fallacy called “arguing from ignorance” and, at worst,
mystery mongering. Skeptics may sometimes be too dismissive, but they
correctly observe that incidents may be unexplained for various reasons,
including insufficient, erroneous, or even falsified evidence—the same reasons
that many crimes remain unsolved.
The appropriate response to reports of alien encounters is neither uncritical
acceptance nor a priori dismissal. Rather, substantive cases should be carefully
investigated in an attempt to solve them.
—JOE NICKELL
No Earthly Explanation (Phillips Publishing, 1974). John Wallace Spencer

proposes that UFO bases in the Earth’s oceans use the Bermuda Triangle to
snatch ships and planes for their experiments. These extraterrestrial colonizers
absorb energy from the world’s power lines and then leave a trail of confusing
patterns of sightings to deceive human governments about the true nature of
their mission.
No further study or serious attention should be given UFOs by the scientific
community, Condon concluded, though his report admitted some UFO reports
are difficult to explain by conventional means. In nearly all cases examined, the
project staff found the persons who reported UFOs “to be normal, responsible
individuals.”
O
Oberg, James E. (b. 1944). Jim Oberg is a computer specialist by education

(M.S. in computing science, University of New Mexico, 1972), served in the
U.S. Air Force from 1970 to 1978, was a flight controller at NASA’s Johnson
Space Center in Houston, Texas, and since 1997 has been a full-time author.
He is a prolific science writer, having written numerous articles for popular
science magazines in America and Europe, particularly Astronomy and Omni.
He is also a principal member of the UFO Subcommittee of the Committee on
the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. In 1979 he won the
worldwide Cutty Sark UFO Essay Contest.
Rt. 2, Box 350

Address:
Dickinson, TX 77539
E-mail: JamesOberg@aol.com
Web site: www.JamesOberg.com

POSITION STATEMENT: The grossest source of error concerning popular ideas
about UFOs remains the sensationalist news media and the pro-UFO groups
whose research has been shown time and again to be superficial and biased.
UFO believers pin their hopes on the “residue” of “unexplained sightings,”
perhaps 2 to 5 percent of the total, insisting that these cases are qualitatively
different from those caused by terrestrial or otherwise “normal” stimuli.
Without more vigorous work, such a thesis cannot be accepted by anyone
who considers all the facts. Generally, UFO writing which is not appallingly
sloppy is in such an advocative mode that deliberate or unconscious distortions
and omissions are commonplace. Until the serious UFO movement refuses to
tolerate such low standards, any “real” UFOs which might represent anomalous
phenomena or extraterrestrial visitors cannot be rigorously separated out from
the overwhelming “noise.” Until that happens, contemporary science is entirely
justified in applying its energies elsewhere.
However, just in case there is something to be learned from the “UFO
phenomenon,” I support the work of such UFO research groups as CUFOS; and
I shall endeavor to correct any straying which I detect from scientific standards,
considering myself a sympathetic critic who really hopes that science can
advance because of discoveries made via UFO research. It is not a view based
on rational observation of the results of the first thirty years of so-ca1led “UFO
research,” but, rather, a judgment similar in nature to that exemplified by the
words of Samuel Johnson, quoted by Boswell, in a comment upon a friend’s
remarriage: “Ahh, the triumph of hope over experience!”
—JAMES E. OBERG
occult connection with UFOs and ET encounters The relationship

between occultism and UFO/extraterrestrial encounters may be ambiguous and
difficult to decipher—but is certain, nonetheless. Long before the modern age
of “flying saucers” began, related—and often identical—phenomena were
known to mystical adepts.
Over the millennia, the secret canons of numerous secret societies have
alluded to visitors from “elsewhere.” More often than not, the preponderance of
“extraterresrialism” in arcane studies tends to present itself on psychic,
spiritual, and/or mediumistic levels. Two exquisite examples are Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772) and Hélène Smith (1861-1930). The former asserted
that he was not only conceptually and telepathically in touch with God and the
angels, but with creatures of other planets as well. The latter was in contact
with entities from Mars, whom she described as “…people exactly like the
inhabitants of our earth, save that both sexes wore the same costume….”
(Flournoy, 1899) She related her psychic transmigrations to the red sphere in
diaries composed in fluent “Martian,” which no one, other than herself, could
decode.
The last great magi Aleister Crowley is said to have had in his employ, at
one time, a scientist who had contact with Kenneth Arnold. So far this writer
has been unable to authenticate this contention, although like names are to be
found in both contexts.
Certain New Age sects have claimed spiritual liaison with “poly-planet”
masters of infinite knowledge and wisdom, but often seem to reflect
misconceptions of South Asian mysticism more than anything else; though
similarities can still be seen with such saucerological mentors as Van Tassel’s
“Council of the Seven Lights” and Angelucci’s spiritual “Overlords.”
Psychic reciprocity is frequent in much of saucerdom and UFOlogy; and
almost all of alienology is permeated with telepathy, clairvoyance,
clairaudience, and precognition with some telekinesis thrown in. Apportation,
teleportation, astral projection, and prophecy often enter the picture as well,
completing the connection with occultism.
Gloria Lee (Byrd), one of the better known minor contactees, found her way
into that odd realm only by virtue of her solely telepathic rapport with
Jupertarians (Jovians).
The connection between these two worlds is one of the most uninvestigated
dimensions of UFOlogy, but possibly could be among the most fruitful.
Unfortunately, even a cursory examination of this strange interplay requires a
solid foundation in both saucer lore and the outré—a rare combination in
scholars of the improbable.
—PARIS FLAMMONDE
References
Flournoy, Théodore. From India to the Planet Mars (Princeton University Press, 1994). Originally
published in 1899.
Spence, Lewis. Encyclopedia of Occultism (University Books, 1960). Originally published in 1920.
Omega Project, The (William Morrow, 1992). Psychology professor Kenneth

Ring spent ten years studying near-death experiences and then read
Communion by Whitley Strieber, which convinced him that numerous
similarities exist between near-death and UFO encounters. In a survey of
several hundred people reporting UFO and near-death episodes, Ring found no
evidence such people had fantasy-prone personalities, yet he did find a pattern
of them reporting much higher than normal incidences of childhood abuse,
trauma, and serious illnesses.
One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History (Editions

Robert Laffont, 1963). Robert Charroux proposes that secret societies, such as
the Freemasons, preserve evidence that Atlantis was an extraterrestrial colony.
Using Incan and other traditions, this Frenchman tries to make a case that
beings from Venus colonized Central America and mated with the humans
found there.
Operation Mainbrace sightings A particularly interesting series of UFO
reports came from the vicinity of the “Operation Mainbrace” NATO maneuvers
held in September 1952. The maneuvers commenced September 13 and lasted
twelve days. According to the U. S. Navy, units of eight NATO governments
and New Zealand participated, including 80,000 men, 1000 planes, and 200
ships in the vicinity of Denmark and Norway. Directed by British Admiral Sir
Patrick Brind, it was the largest NATO maneuver held up until that time.
September 13—The Danish destroyer Willemoes. participating in the
maneuvers, was north of Bornholm Island. During the night, Lieutenant
Commander Schmidt Jensen and several members of the crew saw an
unidentified object, triangular in shape, which moved at high speed toward the
southeast. The object emitted a bluish glow. Commander Jensen estimated the
speed at over 900 mph.
Within the next week, there were four important sightings by well-qualified
observers. (Various sources differ by a day or two on the exact dates, but agree
on details. There is no question about the authenticity of the sightings; the
British cases were officially reported by the Air Ministry, the others are
confirmed by reliable sources. All occurred on or about September 20).
September 19—A British Meteor jet aircraft was returning to the airfield at
Topcliffe, Yorkshire, England just before 11 A.M. As it approached for landing,
a silvery object was observed following it, swaying back and forth like a
pendulum. Lieutenant John W. Kilburn and other observers on the ground said
that when the Meteor began circling, the UFO stopped. It was disk-shaped, and
rotated on its axis while hovering. The disk suddenly took off westward at high
speed, changed course, and disappeared to the southeast.
About September 20—Personnel of the U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt, an
aircraft carrier participating in the Mainbrace maneuvers, observed a silvery,
spherical object which was also photographed. (The pictures have never been
made public). The UFO was seen moving across the sky behind the fleet.
Reporter Wal1ace Litwin took a series of color photographs, which were
examined by Navy Intelligence officers. The Air Force project chief, Captain
Ruppelt stated: “[The pictures] turned out to be excellent. judging by the size of
the object in each successive photo, one could see that it was moving rapidly.”
The possibility that a balloon had been launched from one of the ships was
immediately checked out. No unit had launched a balloon. A poor print of one
of the photographs appears in the Project Blue Book files, but with no analysis
report.
September 20—At Karup Field, Denmark, three Danish Air Force officers
sighted a UFO about 7:30 P.M. The object, a shiny disk with metallic
appearance, passed overhead from the direction of the fleet and disappeared in
clouds to the east.
September 21—Six British pilots flying a formation of RAF jets above the
North Sea observed a shiny sphere approaching from the direction of the fleet.
The UFO eluded their pursuit and disappeared. When returning to base, one of
the pilots looked back and saw the UFO following him, He turned to chase it,
but the UFO also turned and sped away.
September 27/28—Throughout Western Germany, Denmark, and southern
Sweden, there were widespread UFO reports. A brightly luminous object with a
cometlike tail was visible for a long period of time moving irregularly near
Hamburg and Kiel. On one occasion, three satellite objects were reported
moving around a larger object. A cigar-shaped object moving silently eastward
also was reported.
Since existing documentation shows that U. S. Navy and Air Force
Intelligence, and the RAF, were studying these incidents, it is a safe assumption
that more information exists in the files of NATO, the British Air Ministry, the
U. S. Navy, and the U. S. Air Force. The sightings remain unexplained.
—RICHARD HALL
OBE (out-of-body experience) Like the NDE, this is also an experience of

conscious separation from the physical body while retaining full or partial
awareness. OBEs are responsible for a significant portion of ET contact events,
and many contactees with spiritual messages claim to have been given their
teachings by ETs while in an out-of-body state. There are many mystic
practices, especially in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, that train the
practitioner to achieve conscious out-of-body travel.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
P
Palenque astronaut In the ancient Maya city of Palenque (on the Yucatan
Peninsula, in the state of Chiapas, Mexico) stands a seventy-foot-high
limestone pyramid called the Temple of the Inscriptions. Until 1949, the
interior of the structure had remained unexplored. But when the Mexican
archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier noticed finger-holes in one of the large
floor-slabs, he raised the stone and discovered a hidden stairway that had been
deliberately filled in, centuries ago, with stone rubble and clay. After four years
of clearing away the blockage, Ruz and his workers had descended sixty-five
feet into the pyramid, where he came upon a secret tomb. Little did Ruz know
that twenty years later this discovery would be used as one of the “proofs” of
the existence of ancient astronauts.
What has attracted the attention of ancient-astronaut proponents is the stone
carving that decorates the tomb lid. Erich von Däniken describes it this way:
“On the slab [covering the tomb is] a wonderful chiseled relief. In my eyes, you
can see a kind of frame. In the center of that frame is a man sitting, bending
forward. He has a mask on his nose, he uses his two hands to manipulate some
controls, and the heel of his left foot is on a kind of pedal with different
adjustments. The rear portion is separated from him; he is sitting on a
complicated chair , and outside of this whole frame you see a little flame like
an exhaust.”
Could it be that the Palenque tomb lid actually depicts a man piloting a
rocket? The notion becomes less plausible once the various elements that make
up the overall design are examined separately, in detail. Notice first that the
“astronaut” is not wearing a space suit, but is practically naked. The man in this
scene is barefoot, does not wear gloves (both fingernails and toenails are
illustrated), and is outfitted in nothing more than a decorative loin cloth and
jewelry. In other words, he is dressed in typical style, characteristic of the Maya
nobility as to be expected at around A.D. 700. Actually, this is the tomb of the
Maya king Lord-Shield Pacal, who died in A.D. 683.
The details of his royal history are well established. The glyphs carved on
the frame of the sarcophagus lid, as well as other glyphic evidence found in
other temples at the Palenque site, trace his ancestry and give the exact dates of
when he was born, when he ruled, and when he died. When the illustration on
Pacal’s tomb lid is oriented vertically instead of horizontally, we can see that
the “rocket” is actually a composite art form incorporating the design of a
cross, a two-headed serpent, and some large corn leaves. The “oxygen mask” is
an ornament that does not connect with the nostrils, but rather seems to touch
the tip of Pacal’s nose; the “controls” are not really associated with the hands,
but are elements from a profile view of the Maya Sun God in the background;
the “pedal” operated by the “astronaut’s” foot is a sea shell (a Maya symbol
associated with death); and the “rocket’s exhaust” is very likely the roots of the
sacred maize tree (the cross), which is symbolic of the life-sustaining corn
plant. The whole scene is a religious illustration, not a technological one, and is
well understood within the proper context of Maya art.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Story, Ronald. The Space-Gods Revealed (Harper & Row/New English Library, 1976).
———. Guardians of the Universe? (St. Martin’s Press/New English Library, 1980).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (Souvenir Press, 1969; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
Palmer, Raymond A. (1911- 77). Ray Palmer or R. A. P., as he usually signed

his editorials, was the original UFO buff. In his book The World of Flying
Saucers (1963), skeptic Donald Menzel called flying saucers virtually a Palmer
creation. While that is something of an exaggeration, Palmer’s enormous
influence on the early history of UFOlogy can hardly be underestimated. Yet,
by the 1970s his name was little known beyond the small circle of hard-core
buffs. David M. Jacobs’ The UFO Controversy in America (1975), which is
generally considered to be a fairly complete UFO history up through 1974,
mentions him only in a footnote. What happened?
Part of the problem lay in Palmer’s wild and unpredictable imagination. He
was likely to say or do practically anything and would not be contained by
prudence or respectability. Then there was his sense of humor. He left even his
admirers with the uncomfortable feeling that he might be pulling their leg. In
the 1960s, UFOlogist Jim Moseley made a pilgrimage to the Wisconsin farm on
which Palmer spent most of his later years. Palmer asked Moseley rhetorically,
“What if I told you it was all a joke?” In a speech to a UFOlogical convention
in Chicago shortly before his death in 1977, Palmer warned his audience not to
believe everything he said. Serious UFOlogists had a lot of trouble with his
attitude, and they often tried to pretend that Ray Palmer did not exist at all. But
he did.
As a child, Palmer suffered severe injuries, which left him dwarfed in stature
and partially crippled, but he never allowed these handicaps to stop him. In the
1930s and 1940s Palmer was editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic
Adventures. two of America’s best-selling science fiction magazines.
Each issue of the magazines began with a long editorial by Palmer, which
was often more imaginative than the stories it was supposed to introduce! In
1944 there was what John A. Keel has called “a significant prelude to the 1947
flap.” Amazing Stories published a tale called “I Remember Lemuria,” written
by a Pennsylvania welder by the name of Richard S. Shaver. Shaver told of a
secret underground world peopled by Deros (detrimental robots), who caused
most of the world’s troubles by controlling men’s minds with rays projected
from their underground caverns.
According to Keel, “Palmer was amazed when he was buried under
thousands of letters from people claiming they, too, had experiences with the
Dero and that Shaver was telling the truth.” Keel may be overstating the
reaction, but “I Remember Lemuria” did get a great deal of attention from
readers. Several other stories about this underground world were published
under Shaver’s byline, though they were heavily written by Palmer, whose
writing style was unmistakable. Palmer even devoted an entire issue of
Amazing Stories to what he called “The Shaver Mystery.” Palmer no longer
said these underground-world stories were fictitious; now he claimed that they
were products of Shaver’s “racial memory.”
While “the Shaver Mystery” temporarily upped the sales of Palmer-edited
publications, they did not find favor with all science fiction fans. Many began
referring to the series as “the Shaver Hoax.”
Palmer was one of many who was intrigued by Kenneth Arnold’s reported
sighting of a “flying saucer” on June 24, 1947. He wrote about flying saucers in
his editorials. But Ziff-Davis, the publishers of Amazing Stories and Fantastic
Adventures, were not nearly as enthusiastic. They were stung by the “Shaver
Hoax” criticism and disturbed by some of Palmer’s activities on behalf of flying
saucers, and, besides, sales were not what they had hoped. In 1948, Palmer left
Ziff-Davis in a disagreement over an a1l-UFO issue.
That same year, in conjunction with Curtis Fuller, he started Fate magazine,
a publication devoted to the exploration of strange phenomena. The first issue
contained a by-lined article by Arnold, defending his flying saucer sighting
from criticism and ridicule.
During this same period, Palmer became involved with the most
controversial incident in his UFOlogical career, the Maury Island hoax. Two
men, Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman, claimed that they had seen a flock of
flying saucers while boating off Maury Island, near Tacoma, Washington, in
June 1947. They got in touch with Palmer, who sent no other than Kenneth
Arnold out to investigate. Arnold thought the story was too big for him, and he
contacted the Air Force. Two intelligence officers were sent to interview
Crisman and Dahl. On their return flight, their plane crashed and both were
killed.
An investigation of the crash found nothing out of the ordinary and
concluded that the entire Maury Island incident was a hoax. The investigation
also concluded that Palmer had actually encouraged the hoax and was,
indirectly at least, responsible for the death of the two officers. Palmer put a
different interpretation on the incident. He hinted darkly at some sort of “cover-
up” and “conspiracy” and said that he wanted “no more blood on his hands.”
This was the first or one of the first times that the “conspiracy of silence”
theme was injected into UFOlogical thinking.
In the early 1950s, Palmer moved to Amherst, Wisconsin, sold his interest in
Fate, and started his own publishing company. For years he put out a
bewildering variety of books and periodicals, many on occult or other
“borderland” subjects. Most of Palmer’s ventures were only marginally
profitable. His most successful and longest-lived periodical was Flying
Saucers. While this magazine never had a circulation that exceeded a few
thousand, it was, for many years, the largest circulation American magazine
dealing exclusively with the subject.
Early on, Palmer himself had abandoned the mundane idea that UFOs came
from outer space. He actively promoted the theory that UFOs came from the
Shaverian underground world, and that they flew out of the “Hollow Earth”
through holes at the North and South Poles.
Though the UFOs from the hollow Earth idea never really caught on,
Palmer’s influence on the popularity of UFOs in America was enormous. He
was the subject’s earliest and most consistent publicist. Through Fate, and later
Flying Saucers, he continued to print UFO reports at times when it seemed that
practically everyone else had lost interest.
Ray Palmer died on August 15, 1977.
—DANIEL COHEN
Paradox: The Case for the Extraterrestrial Origin of Man (Crown,

1977). Irish archeologist John Philip Cohane believes Homo sapiens are
descended directly from extraterrestrial colonists who genetically manipulated
apes. He bases this conclusion primarily on two observations: inadequate fossil
records to indicate an evolutionary link between humans and apes; and humans
are “too spiritually refined” to be related to other primates.
Parallel Time Line The time line which follows is intended to show the history
of UFOlogy and SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in context
with developments in science and technology, and other world events, as well
as the symbiotic relationship between UFO-ET events and science fiction.
Notably absent are new and exciting developments in the world’s religions,
whereas the opposite is true in the joint-category of science and technology.
It is also notable that developments in science have probably influenced the
UFO mythology as much as, or possibly even more so, than science fiction.
& RONALD D. STORY
References
Cooke, Jean; Kramer, Ann; and Rowland-Entwistle. History’s Timeline (Barnes & Noble Books, 1996).
Engelbert, Phillis, and Dupuis, Diane L. The Handy Space Answer Book (Visible Ink Press, 1998).
Flammonde, Paris. UFO Exist! (Ballantine, 1976).
Gribbin, John, ed. A Brief History of Science (Barnes & Noble, 1998).
Hall, Richard. “Chronology of Important Events in UFO History” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The
Hellemans, Alexander, and Bunch, Bryan. The Timetables of Science (Simon & Schuster, 1988).
Imhoff, Susan; MacShamhráin; Killeen, Richard, et. al. Timelines of World History (Quadrillion
Pulishing/CLB, 1998).
Stein, Werner; Grun, Bernard, et. al. The Timetables of History (Simon & Schuster, 1979).
Time Almanac 2000 (Information Please, 2000).
Time: Great Images of the 20th Century (Time Books, 1999).
Time magazine (Fall, 1992) special issue. Research by Deborah Wells and Ratu Kamlani.
Trench, Brinsley LePoer. The Flying Saucer Story (Ace, 1966).
Urdang, Laurence, ed. The Timetables of American History (Simon & Schuster, 1981).
Vallée, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Ace, 1965).
World Events: 1000 Events That Changed the World (Rand McNally, 2000).
paranoia and UFOs Is UFOlogy a species of paranoia? In common usage,

paranoia is exemplified by individuals who believe that others are persecuting
or spying on them. Such people will describe events and point to evidence that
some sort of covert plot is being directed against them. For those confronted
with making judgment on these beliefs, the issue is generally one of the
individual’s interpretation rather than his facticity. The evidence is real enough,
but is the interpretation valid, or is the person applying, in Jacques Lacan’s
phrase, “a novel form of syntax” in expressing his experience of the world? The
paranoid’s experience of the bond of the human community is troubled, and
there is a resultant distortion of his style of thought, with inflation in the
significance of trivial things in the environment. A torn letter is taken as
evidence of CIA surveillance. That the letter is junk mail is a criticism that will
only temporarily faze his confidence in the general frame of his beliefs. The
disparity between the strangeness of the claim and triviality of the proof, so
striking to the onlooker, is ignored in the need to believe that some power is
intent on subverting his life. (Clement, 1983)
In this most common sense, UFOlogy should have been recognized as a
manifestation of the paranoid style of thought decades ago. Amid the silly
political ploys of UFOlogists like Richard Haines to gerry-mander solved UFO
reports out of existence by linguistic fiat, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that
the U in UFO stands for “unidentified,” not “unexplained.” (Haines, 1987). The
word contains an important connotation and suggests a presumption. The flying
object has not provided identification of itself. No radio contact. No flight plan.
Remember, the term was introduced by the U.S. Air Force. The initial suspicion
was that Russian spycraft were breaching U.S. security for unknown ends. The
escalation of the hypothesis to suspicion of extraterrestrial reconnaissance
retained the presumption of a furtive spying intelligence.
The manner of presentation of their reality never made great sense, and the Air
Force eventually stated that UFOs were not a direct threat to U.S. security. Time
has fully borne out that judgment. Civilian UFO investigators, however, argued
that even one unsolved UFO report held enormous implications and continued to
entertain the interpretation of UFOs as evidence of extraterrestrial visitation.
Apart from the hoaxes, the physical evidence used to argue UFO reality is as
trivial as the things used to support the more personal delusions of other
paranoids—lost rings, dimming lights, mechanical failures, unexplained
medical ailments, overinterpreted photographs, etc. UFOs never melt cars into
radioactive puddles, snatch up football stadiums, invert amino acid in victims,
or leave behind slabs of multiquark strong force adaptors when they crash. In
short, there is nothing that requires an extramundane explanation. This is not to
say that there is always an obvious mundane solution, but even less airy
paranoids can ask questions hard to answer. Common sense arguments directed
at the strangeness of the frame of belief are generally dismissed. The problem
of noncontact, first advanced by the father of UFOlogy himself, Charles Fort,
has been termed a debunker’s ploy to subvert UFO research or merely labeled
irrelevant.
No one would question that this or that individual UFOlogist is paranoid, but
the collective enterprise has somehow managed to escape the notice of the
diagnosticians. By faulting the reality-testing processes of UFOlogy, orthodox
science has implicitly exiled it among the psychoses. (Frosch, 1983) It never
bothered to explain the UFOlogists’ delusion, however. The oversight is
regrettable at least from the humanitarian point of view that one should try to
understand those he opposes and gain, if not empathy, perspective and depth.
But science has also missed the philosophical pleasure of forming an esthetic
gestalt of the history of UFO belief.
The exercise in taxonomy does not result merely in a descriptive conclusion.
The realization that UFOlogy is a species of paranoia means that the
psychological literature on paranoia will provide insights into the dynamics of
UFO belief. Certainly, the most intriguing fruit yielded by a consideration of
the clinical profile of paranoia is the discovery that paranoid beliefs are not
static facets of personality. They evolve. In fact, paranoia follows a well-
defined progression that is remarkable in the “almost monotonous regularity”
of its development. It advances through a series of stages that begins with
shame and ends in delusions of grandeur. The full schematic runs as follows:
• A precipitation factor—a social setback or a slight or humiliation

• A sensitivity to external contacts
• An asocial withdrawal of some kind
• Subjective preoccupations
• Hypochondriasis—the search for medical verification of illness and failure
to find it
• Increased concern, even obsession, with bodily functions
• Increasing worry—Why? What? When?
• Irrational revelation-the formulation of a manufactured insight into how the
illness happened
• Somatic delusions and retrospective falsification of the origins of the
physical complaint
• Projection—the belief the illness is caused by an external factor
• Systematization of the delusion, clarification, shift of anxiety and consequent
reintegration of personality
• Conspiracy logic (interpretation of events as links in a conspiracy) with a
widening circle of persecutors worldwide
• Puzzlement about why persecution has focused on self
• Delusions of grandeur
• Recognition of an important mission such as saving the world or being a
messenger of God
• Cosmic identity—belief that “I am the universe” or “I am God.”
There is a striking correspondence between this progression and the history of

UFOlogy. (Frosch, 1983)
If UFO belief behaves like other systems of paranoia, it should begin in
social setbacks and humiliations. On the sociological level, Donald I. Warren’s
study of Gallup poll data offers evidence that social setbacks may be a common
element in the histories of UFO believers. Warren found that highly educated
males who were stuck in lower-paying occupations than they were educated for
are five to sixteen times more likely to report UFOs than their fellow students
who “made it.” Warren termed this condition the “status inconsistency theory.”
(Warren, 1970)
On the historical level, the origin of UFOlogy as a discipline is credited to
Charles Fort. Damon Knight’s biography of Fort gives clear proof that Fort’s
paranoid syntax originated in a social setback. As a young man, Fort traveled
around the world with the definite purpose of accumulating experiences and
impressions of life so as to become a writer. After a few years he settled down
with a wife and began to write. In 1905, he was briefly hailed as a new and rare
literary star, but his ambitions went largely unrequited. By 1906, he was
harboring intense feelings of bitterness and hatred. Months passed without his
being able to sell any of his work. Images of suicide filled his mind. He was
crushed by the poverty he was living in. He turned to novels instead of short
stories and in 1909 published The Outcast Manufacturers. It fell into neglect.
He withdrew from life and immersed himself in reading. Little is known about
the next few years, partly because he destroyed his notes and writings. We do
know he wrote a crank work called X, which revolved around the idea that
Mars invisibly controlled all life on Earth by means of rays, rather as light in a
movie camera controls the images on a sensitive film. (Rarely do you see
projection taken quite so literally!) Fort followed this by another excessive
work called Y (around 1915). It apparently involved a sinister civilization at the
South Pole from which Kaspar Hauser, a mysterious boy who showed up in
Nuremberg in 1828, had hailed. Fort supposedly says that Hauser was
murdered to prevent him from revealing the truth about “Y-land.” Both X and Y
went unpublished and apparently were trashed. In a correspondence with
Theodore Dreiser in 1916, Fort fancied himself being in “communion with
strange orthogenetic gods.” By 1919, the progression was complete. The Book
of the Damned advances a philosophical position that Fort calls
“Intermediatism” which argues that all acts of identification are arbitrary
because reality, the Universal, is one intercontinuous nexus in which all
seeming things are but localized expressions of independence. In Fort’s clever
analogy, “I think we’re all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of
an all-inclusive cheese.” Wan tracings of paranoid syntax can be discerned in a
number of his musings. The excluding System that excludes all others, that
“quasi-opposes” the data he has collected; the surreptitious Visitors that
secretly communicate with esoteric cults who direct humanity, etc. Fort had
been a class clown in school, and the clown in his personality impishly plays
with beliefs that the Earth may not be round or “that science and imbecility are
continuous.” The term paranoid thus seems somehow inappropriately
overstated as descriptive of the man. In fact, there is such erudition,
sophistication, and good-natured fun in his books that I still think him a
veritable saint over all who succeeded him. The central point, however, must
not be missed: UFOlogy began in the paranoid musings of a failed novelist.
(Knight, 1970)
UFOlogy as a cultural phenomenon originates in a different man. It was
Kenneth Arnold’s report of an impossibly fast-moving group of unknown
objects near Mount Rainier which propelled the idea of flying saucers into a
worldwide myth. The investigations of J. Allen Hynek and subsequent
debunkers, I have learned from my reassessment of the facts of the case, were
frankly bungled. A plausible solution was possible, but between incorrect
presumptions and failure to see the obvious, it was missed. Arnold’s
observations were consistent with his seeing a distant flock of pelicans at a
shallow viewing angle. I do not fault Arnold for an honest puzzlement under
conditions that made identification unlikely and I think a bit of righteous
indignation against his detractors was fully indicated. What I do fault is
Arnold’s style of interpretation. His initial interpretation of the objects as
military aircraft was reasonable as a first guess. But after he performed some
calculations showing that the objects had been traveling close to 1700 miles per
hour, there clearly had to be some rethinking, since such speeds were far in
excess of any piloted craft flown in 1947. But instead of abandoning the
hypothesis, he escalated it. He drifted into a belief that the objects were
missiles being tested secretly by the U.S. or some foreign government. This
suggests a paranoid orientation in his thinking. This would be only speculation
had not Greg Long done an interview with Arnold years later and uncovered a
clear slant in his beliefs toward conspiracy logic and grandiosity. Arnold
believed in 1981 that Hynek was probably “still working with the Air Force,” a
ludicrous idea from the standpoint of the politics of UFOlogy but
psychologically explicable as due to the animosity Arnold would feel toward
Hynek for his debunking attempt.
Arnold’s belief that the government was deeply fearful of phenomena like
UFOS, because they would “cause their self-destruction,” bespeaks the
grandiosity of an advanced system of paranoia. Arnold’s background provides
further grist for the mill of the diagnostician. In his early years he showed great
promise as an athlete. He was selected all-state end in 1932 and 1933 for North
Dakota, had entered U.S. Olympic trials, taught swimming and diving, and had
planned to use his athletic talent to achieve a college education. On entering
college, however, his plans collapsed because of a knee injury. With no
finances, he dropped out and in time became adept at selling firefighting
equipment Thus we see again the role of social setbacks in originating the
belief in UFOs. (Steiger, 1976)
With the origin accounted for, we can move on to the evolution of UFOlogy.
For convenience it will be treated as a collective phenomenon rather than as the
work of individuals. Ours will be a somewhat “cooked” history, but it should be
fairly true to the major trends.
Early UFOlogy was characterized by oversensitivity to personal interactions.
Many UFOlogists withdrew and chose not to share their research with anybody.
Feuds existed between all the organizations involved in saucer belief. The Air
Force itself forbade talk about UFOs to civilians. The period has been termed
UFOlogy’s Dark Age. UFOlogy as a body turned inward on itself. Some
UFOlogists turned to studying the backgrounds of other UFOlogists. Donald
Keyhoe kept files on everybody. Others collected “seed catalogues” of UFO
sightings and took to searching for patterns. By playing connect the dots in this
way, Aimé Michel invented the delusion of orthoteny. Expressing a growing
fear, he asked, “Why does this sword of Damocles hang over our heads, year
after year, without falling?” The fear of invasion became palpable by the mid-
1960s, and all UFOlogists predicted that the mystery would break soon. Some
proclaimed that UFOs were hostile and pointed to injuries and mechanical
disruptions attributed to UFOs. (Keel, 1975a)
UFOlogists called for Congressional hearings and demanded that the reality
of UFOs be verified and acknowledged. The Condon Committee was set up
and, of course, deemed UFOs to be harmless to security interests and lacking in
scientific value. Meanwhile, UFO books flooded out of publishing houses,
complaining that UFOs were a real and serious problem. The invasion,
however, never materialized. What, then, were UFOs up to? How long had this
been going on? The New UFOlogists ransacked the mythologies of the world
and saw parallels in ancient religions and the fairy faith. An irrational insight
arose: the Phenomenon is deceiving us to make us believe in it. Hypnosis as a
memory-enhancer made inroads among some researchers.
By the 1970s, the belief had become widespread that some external agent
was engineering UFO experiences in the minds of UFO percipients.
Influencing-machine fantasies began to clog the growing vocabularies of
UFOlogists with phrases like control systems, psychotronics, the
superspectrum, ultraterrestrials, alternate reality theory, space beams, cosmic
consciousness conditioning, tensor-beam monitored knowledge implants,
psychokinetic effects on brain cells, superminds, and Geopsyche. (See MIND
CONTROL BY ALIENS)
Around 1974, a new, stern, businesslike UFOlogy replaced the old amateurs.
The anxieties of a couple of years before suddenly lifted. (Greenfield, 1976)
In the late 1970s, Jacques Vallée began to advance the “Martian hypothesis,”
which postulated government manipulation of UFO belief. Alternatively, he
felt, some occult group could be engaging in a deception. (Vallée, 1979)
Elsewhere, old rumors of a government conspiracy to withhold the remains of
UFO crashes began to be taken seriously.
Though the retrievalist fantasy was initially resisted, it soon came to occupy
center stage in such issues as Roswell and the MJ-12 documents controversy.
Cosmic Watergate, over time, expanded into a vision of international
conspiracy and beyond. UFO mythology fused with traditional conspiracy
literature as links to Trilateralism and the even the Illuminati were proposed.
For some the conspiracy extended off-planet with Grays having a deal with the
government, allowing Grays to abduct humans with impunity in exchange for
advanced technology. In a later development, Helmut Lammer’s MILAB
project explores proposed links between abductions and the military.
During the 1990s, signs of grandeur became evident in a number of
UFOlogical authors. The most florid and well-documented concerns Philip
Corso’s claims in the best selling The Day After Roswell and elsewhere. An
appendix to the paperback version of Kal Korff’s The Roswell UFO Crash
details the matter convincingly and is recommended as a high profile instance
of the trait.
Cosmic identity also becomes a notable feature in this period, most blatantly
in John Mack’s latest offering Passport to the Cosmos (1999) when it speaks of
a “shift of consciousness that is collapsing duality and enabling us to see that
we are connected beyond the Earth at a cosmic level.” One can find analogous
sentiments in works by Steiger, Lewels, Howe, Heseman, Fowler, and Ware.
(See THREAT, UFO-ET)
It needs to be emphasized that UFOlogy consists of diverse individuals and
obviously some people arrive at the various stages before or after the larger
group. John Keel and D. Scott Rogo arrived at the cosmic identity stage years
before the current crop sprouted. (See MIND CONTROL BY ALIENS) Some current
authors, largely those concerned with abductions or Dulce Base lore, are back
in the hypochondriasis stage. David Jacobs’s The Threat is the most prominent
example of this regression with its fears that hybrids and insectoids will be
taking over the planet before too very long, dooming human freedom and
maybe much of the population as well. Exceptions are common, but the mass
of UFO works exhibits a robust progression conforming to the stages of
paranoia.
With the full sequence of development having now been reached, there is
little left for prediction. Beyond more examples of cosmic identity appearing
and the eventual advance of stragglers to later stages, the crystal ball clouds up
for the future of the field. Apart from celebration of a nice ordering of the
history of UFOlogy, there are may yet be other matters to attend to.
The monotonous regularity of paranoid styles of thought prompted some
psychologists to explore its etiology. Why are paranoids paranoid? Temporally,
the precipitating factor may be ridicule or setbacks, but not everybody
victimized by shame becomes psychotic. Some sort of personality deficit must
also be involved in a paranoid reaction.
In his discussion of paranoia, John Frosch cites a 1949 study by Klein and
Horowitz involving 80 paranoids, which uncovered a singular instance of a
psychological universal. Every paranoid had had an extremely disruptive, cruel,
and violent childhood upbringing. Marital strife was common among the
parents. They also found poor adult sexual development related to a
background of masturbatory guilt. Generalized problems dealing with failure
and blows to pride were also found, repticating psychoanalytic observations
going back to Freud. Traumatic humiliation during the formation of sexual
identity seems to contribute to the paranoid’s fixed understanding of the nature
of dominance and submission. Paranoia thus must be deeply rooted to a learned
sense of the self as powerless before those who first had control over his life.
(Frosch, 1983)
Do UFOlogists have traumatic childhoods? We don’t know. Only in the
instance of Charles Fort do we have information. In his case, the answer is
“absolutely yes.” His father treated him with severity in ways that can only be
termed, by present standards, savage. We know he was beaten with a dog whip.
He was struck in the face with force enough to cause blood to gush from his
nose. After one episode of discipline, Fort butted his head against a banister,
trying to kill himself and, failing in that, he ran up and down the hall in a
frenzy. After he reached a certain age, his father finally stopped beating him
and, instead, sentenced him to days or weeks in solitude. (Knight, 1970)
Whether similar horror stories lie in tile backgrounds of other UFOlogists can
only be a matter of conjecture or an issue to be explored by more resourceful
psychological investigators.
There are a number of studies of UFO belief that support the general thesis
here. Sprinkle and Parnell gave two standard psychological tests to 225 people
who reported UFO experiences. Both tests found moderately elevated scores on
the Pa scale (paranoia), and those with communication experiences were
significantly more elevated. (Parnell and Sprinkle, 1990) Rodeghier,
Goodpaster, and Blatterbauer got a Pa score consistent within less than a point
to Parnell and Sprinkle when they gave the MMPI to 27 abductees. (Rodeghier,
Goodpaster, and Blatterbauer, 1991).
When Sprinkle gave 259 NICAP members a test instrument designed to
measure open vs. closed-mindedness, the score showed significantly higher
levels of dogmatism among UFOlogists than a control group of psychologists
and counselors. (Sprinkle, 1969) This fits in well with other studies linking
prejudice to paranoia and superstitious beliefs to closed minds. (Allport, 1960)
The sense of powerlessness underlying much of paranoia was confirmed in a
master's dissertation by Stephen P. Resta. Though it was primarily directed at
testing the prediction of anomie made by the status inconsistency theory of
UFO belief, Resta included a test for locus of control, a trendy topic at the time,
to see what it might turn up. Interestingly, the anomie test failed, chalking up a
second anomaly for Warren’s thesis. The Warren study failed to find elevated
belief in certain categories predicted by his theory. Resta added that he found
no evidence of the feelings of alienation expected by the tenets of status
inconsistency theory. The test for locus of control, however, yielded a strong
positive correlation (r = .32 significant to the .01 level) between UFO belief
and external locus of control. (Resta, 1975) Externality is defined as the belief
that one’s life is primarily ruled by external circumstances as opposed to one’s
internal directives. It involves the sense of the self as powerless. Resta’s finding
dovetails perfectly with UFO belief being a manifestation of the deeply rooted
feeling of powerlessness that results in paranoia.
If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the etiology of paranoia will
apply to UFOlogists, we are given new insight into certain aspects of UFOlogy
that initially seem impenetrable. Why do UFOlogists dismiss the problem of
noncontact so effortlessly? They may have learned early in life that the higher
powers in their world could not be counted on to be either benevolent or
rational. Why do UFOlogists accept abductee tales more readily than tales of
Space Brothers, given the almost identical character of the objective evidence?
The answer may lie in the fact that the feelings of powerlessness emerging from
these accounts are very real in a way that the sugary paternalism of
contacteeism cannot compare with. How can some UFOlogists believe that a
democratic government could withhold the treasures of an extraterrestrial crash
from its capitalistic and sensation-mongering constituency? If you can’t trust
parents to be generous, you certainly can’t expect generosity from a
government.
Such psychologizing is admittedly presumptuous, but the conclusion is
preeminently humanitarian. It allows us to understand that the enterprise of
UFOlogy is not an incomprehensibly malicious exercise in subverting truth.
Rather it is a tragedy in which the tortured souls of UFOlogists are ensnared in
a terrifying vision of dark and furtive power.
References
Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice (Anchor Books, 1958).
Clement, Catherine. The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan (Columbia University Press, 1983).
Greenfield, Allen H. Saucers and Saucerers (Pan American New Physics Press, 1976).
Haines, Richard. “Defining the UFO” in UFOs: 1947-1987 edited by Hilary Evans (Fortean Tomes, 1987).
Hopkins, Budd. Intruders (Random House, 1987; Ballantine, 1988).
Keel, John A. “The Flying Saucer Subculture,” Journal of Popular Subculture (Spring, 1975).
———. The Eighth Tower (Saturday Review Press, 1975; Signet/NAL, 1977).).
Knight, Damon. Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (Doubleday, 1970).
Parnell, June O. and Sprinkle, R. Leo. “Personality Characteristics of Persons who Claim UFO
Experiences,” Journal of UFO Studies (1990).
Resta, Stephen P. “The Relationship of Anomie and Externality to Strength of Belief in Unidentified
Flying Objects,” Dissertation: Loyola College Graduate School, Baltimore, Md. (1975).
Roberts, Anthony, and Gilbertson, Geoff. The Dark Gods (Rider/Hutchinson, 1980).
Rodeghier, Mark, Goodpaster, Jeff & Blatterbauer, Sandra. “Psychosocial Charcteristics of Abductees:
Results from the CUFOS Abduction Project,” Journal of UFO Studies (1991).
Rogo, D. Scott. Miracles (Dial Press, 1982).
Rokeach, Milton. The Open and Closed Mind (Basic Books, 1960).
Sprinkle, R. Leo. “Personal and Scientific Attitudes: A Study of Persons Interested in UFO Reports,”
Flying Saucer Review, Special Issue #2 (June, 1969).
Steiger, Brad. Project Blue Book (Ballantine Books, 1976).
Vallée, Jacques. Messengers of Deception (And/Or Press, 1979).
Warren, Donald I. “Status Inconsistency Theory and Flying Saucer Sightings,” Science (November 6,
1970).
Parra incident Yelling, without his shirt and with a terrified look on his face,
Jose Parra, an eighteen-year-old jockey from Valencia, Venezuela, arrived at a
police station in the early morning of December 19, 1954, and related his hair-
raising tale of how a hairy little man tried to kidnap him.
A rendering of the Parra incident by artist Hal Crawford
Upon his arrival, Parra was detained by Mr. Lopez Ayara, Commissioner of
Criminal Investigation, until he calmed down. Detectives detailed to examine
the place where the incident supposedly happened found tracks which they
were not able to identify as either those of a man or an animal. Parra, out doing
road work to lose some extra poundage, stopped near a cement factory on the
highway, where he was surprised to see six little “men,” all very hairy, who
were engaged in pulling boulders from the side of the highway and loading
them aboard their disk-shaped craft, which was hovering less than nine feet
from the ground. Parra, startled and frightened, started to run away to call
someone else to watch the sight.
At this point, one of the little men spotted Parra, and pointed a device at him
which gave off a violet light. Parra was unable to move and stood by helplessly
while the little creatures ran to their ship and leaped aboard. The craft then
disappeared into the sky.
One hour after Mr. Parra’s experience, a brightly lit disk was seen hovering a
few feet from the ground near the Barbula Sanitorium for Tuberculars at
Valencia. Two hospital employees saw the object at different times, one at
about twelve midnight and the other at about 3:15 A.M. The man who witnessed
the earlier incident notified no one for fear of disturbing the hospital patients.
The man involved in the latter incident attempted to approach the craft for a
better look, but it moved away and disappeared into the sky.
—APRO
Pascagoula (Mississippi) abduction On the evening of October 11, 1973,

while fishing in the Pascagoula River, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker
claimed they not only saw a strange, egg and saucer-shaped object, but were
abducted by three creatures. The beings floated from the object, captured both
men, and took them up into the craft where they were subjected to a medical-
type examination. When the examination was over, the men were returned to
their original location.
Drawing of the space ship, as described by Hickson and Parker
The craft was described as blue-gray in color, saucer-shaped, and had two
portholes. Hickson said it made a sustained “buzzing” noise and had a flashing
blue light. The aliens were described as mummy-like with crab-like pinchers
for hands, a pointy nose, and pointy ears. These creatures floated out of the
saucer and moved around like robots, according to Hickson.
According to Hickson and Parker, they didn’t know what to do, so they had
a couple of drinks. Hickson, who would claim he wanted no publicity, first
sought out reporters, but could not find any. He finally went to the local sheriff
and told the story. Within hours it was front-page news.
One of the mummy-like aliens, as described by Hickson and Parker
Dr. James Harder of APRO (the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization)

and former U.S. Air Force scientific consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek of CUFOS
(the Center for UFO Studies) rushed to Pascagoula to interview the men.
Harder used hypnosis in an attempt to learn more about the abduction. When he
completed his sessions, Harder told reporters that he believed the tale. Hynek
agreed.
Controversy raged. Skeptics demanded a polygraph examination and
Hickson took one. But the operator, a man from New Orleans, had not
completed his training, and so the results were questionable. Philip Klass, as
well as others, suggested the test was invalid. Klass also noted that Parker had a
nervous breakdown and never took the test.
In October 1975, about two years after the event, Hickson was invited to
participate in a UFO conference held in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on the condition
that he would take a second polygraph examination. He agreed.
Upon arrival, however, Hickson declined to take the test on the advice of his
attorney. Some said it was because it would be administered at the local police
station and should have been held on neutral ground. Police officers said that
part of the effectiveness of the test was to have it given at the police station.
Whatever the reason, Hickson refused to take the test, and many believe it
compromised his credibility. And there were other problems with the case.
There were constant changes in the details. Although researchers believe
that minor alterations in a story are natural, these went beyond that. These
changes seemed to be in response to criticisms and appeared to be an attempt to
smooth out rough spots in the story. To skeptics, such inconsistencies suggest a
hoax.
The landing site of the UFO was only a few hundred yards away from and in
full view of a heavily traveled highway. No one ever came forward to
corroborate the story, or to suggest that he or she had been on the highway and
saw the UFO.
Although Parker has generally remained quiet about the events, Hickson has
moved on to more contacts. His tale began to take on more attributes of the
tales of typical “contactees,” in that he claimed to be in contact with the alien
creatures.
In the final analysis, most of those who accept extraterrestrial visitation as a
fact also accept the Pascagoula abduction at face value; whereas most skeptics
and debunkers believe this case is a hoax.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
References
Blum, Ralph and Judy. Beyond Earth: Man’s Contact with UFOs (Bantam Books, 1974).
Randle, Kevin D. “Pascagoula (Mississippi) abduction” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of
UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
Passport to Magonia (Henry Regnery, 1969). Jacques Vallée sees the UFO
phenomenon as a metaphysical programming process to prepare us for higher
consciousness. In this path-breaking book he makes a compelling case that all
religious apparitions, mystical experiences and UFO sightings rely upon the
same mechanisms, sharing similar effects on the human observer, varying only
to the extent that the projections are interpreted within the prevailing cultural
environment. If it were possible to construct three-dimensional holograms with
mass then most religious miracles and UFO sightings could be similarly
explained. He raises the prospect that humankind is being exposed to
deliberately staged and faked apparitions intended to program our imaginations
and accelerate our evolution as a species.
Pflock, Karl T. (b. 1943). A former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense,
CIA intelligence officer, and senior congressional aide, Karl Pflock is now a
writer, consultant, and UFO researcher. His articles on UFOs have appeared in
such journals as Omni, Fortean Times, the International UFO Reporter, The
Anomalist, Fate, the MUFON UFO Journal, Cuadernos de Ufologia (Spain),
and the MLTFON 1995 International UFO Symposium Proceedings. A popular
speaker, he was named 1998 UFOlogist of the Year by the National UFO
Conference.
His interest in UFOs is virtually lifelong, stemming from a crashed-saucer
story he overheard at the age of five or six and a multiple-witness sighting in
which he was involved in the early 1950s.
In the late 1960s, he was the first chairman of the National Capital Area
(investigative) Subcommittee of the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). He has carried out independent research on UFO-
occupant sightings and contacts and allegations of UFO-connected animal
mutilations, but is best known in contemporary UFOlogy for his controversial
work on the Roswell incident.
Karl T. Pflock
His Roswell in Perspective was published by the Fund for UFO Research in
1994, and an even more definitive work, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the
Will to Believe, was published by Prometheus Books in 2001. He is also
collaborating with James W. Moseley, editor of the newsletter Saucer Smear,
on Shockingly Close to the Truth! Moseley’s UFOlogical memoirs (to be
published by Prometheus in 2002).
P.O. Box 93338

Address:
Albuquerque, NM 87199 U.S.A.
E-mail: Ktperehwon@aol.com
POSITON STATEMENT: UFOs are real—that is, as yet unexplained

phenomena. Moreover, many solid unknowns involving reports of strange craft
and sometimes living creatures and/or physical evidence leave us with but two
choices, hoax or real essentially as reported, while some admit of a
psychological explanation as well. In these instances, if what occurred was real
and reasonably accurately reported, they must have been encounters with
products of non-human intelligence and, in some cases, the intelligences
themselves.
Based on the data, I’m subjectively certain we have been visited by
nonhuman intelligent beings--to my ‘50s-conditioned mind, most likely from
an extra-solar planet of our galaxy. However, we do not yet have proof of this--
as opposed to very strong evidence pointing to it--though such proof very well
may be in the data already in hand, as yet unrecognized as such.
I use the past tense advisedly. If I am correct that some sightings were
observations of such visitors and their vehicles, I suspect they were here and
left some time ago--arriving in the early to mid- 1940s, departing in the late
1960s or early 1970s. They came here because Sol and his planets seemed
cozily familiar. They studied our entire system and us quite closely. Once in a
while a couple of grad students got out of hand and buzzed the natives. On
occasion some ambitious scientists overstepped a bit and interfered with the
locals--the famous and likely real 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill
comes to mind. Then they left, leaving us wondering, dreaming, and hoping.
—KARL T. PFLOCK
Phoenix (Arizona) lights At approximately 6:55 P.M. (Pacific Time) on

Thursday, March 13, 1997, a young man in Henderson, Nevada, reportedly
witnessed a V-shaped object, with six large lights on its leading edge, approach
his position from the northwest and pass overhead. In his subsequent written
report to the National UFO Reporting Center, he described it as appearing to be
quite large, approximately the “size of a [Boeing] 747,” and said that it
generated a sound which he equated to that of “rushing wind.” It continued on a
straight line toward the southeast and disappeared from his view over the
horizon.
This sighting is perhaps the earliest of a complex series of events that would
take place during the next 2-3 hours over the states of Nevada, Arizona, and
possibly New Mexico, and which would quickly become known as the
“Phoenix Lights.” It involved sightings by tens, or perhaps even hundreds, of
thousands of witnesses on the ground, and it gave rise to a storm of controversy
over what had caused the event.
The next reported sighting was from a former police officer in Paulden,
Arizona. He had just left his home at approximately 8:15 P.M. (Mountain Time),
and was driving north, when he looked out the driver’s window of his car to the
west and witnessed a cluster of five reddish or orange lights.
The formation consisted of four lights together, with a fifth light seemingly
“trailing” the other four. Each of the individual lights in the formation appeared
to the witness to consist of two separate point sources of orange light.
Artist’s conception by Robert Fairfax
The witness immediately returned to his home, obtained a pair of binoculars,

and watched as the lights disappeared over the horizon to the south. He
watched the lights for an estimated two minutes, and reported that they made
no sound that he could discern from his vantage point on the ground.
Within a matter of minutes of these first sightings, a “blitz” of telephoned
reports began pouring into the National UFO Reporting Center, to other UFO
organizations, to law enforcement offices, to news media offices, and to Luke
Air Force Base. They were submitted from Chino Valley, Prescott, Prescott
Valley, Dewey, Cordes Junction, Wickenburg, Cavecreek, and many other
communities to the north and west of Phoenix.
Witnesses were reporting such markedly different objects and events that
night that it was difficult for investigators to understand what was taking place.
Some witnesses reported five lights, others seven, or even more. Some reported
that the lights were distinctly orange or red, whereas others reported distinctly
white or yellow lights. Many reported the lights were moving across the sky at
seemingly high speed, whereas others reported they moved at a slow (angular)
velocity, or they even hovered motionless for several minutes.
Illustration by Robert Fairfax
These apparent discrepancies, together with the large number of

communities from which sightings were being reported in rapid sequence,
raised early suspicions that multiple objects were involved in the event, and
that they perhaps were traveling at high speed. These suspicions would be
borne out over subsequent months, following extensive investigation by many
individuals. The investigations pointed to the fact that several objects, all
markedly different in appearance, and most of them almost unbelievably large,
passed over Arizona that night.
One group of three witnesses, located just north of Phoenix, reported seeing
a huge, wedge-shaped craft with five lights on its ventral surface pass overhead
with an eerie “gliding” type of flight. It coursed to the south and passed
between two mountain peaks to the south. The witnesses emphasized how huge
the object was, blocking out up to 70-90 degrees of the sky.
A second group of witnesses, a mother and four daughters near the
intersection of Indian School Road and 7th Avenue, were shocked to witness an
object, shaped somewhat like a sergeant’s stripes, approach from over
Camelback Mountain to the north. They report that it stopped directly above
them, where it hovered for an estimated 5 minutes. They described how it filled
at least 30-40 degrees of sky, and how it exhibited a faint glow along its trailing
edge. The witnesses felt they could see individual features on the ventral
surface of the object, and they were certain that they were looking at a very
large, solid object.
The object began moving slowly to the south, at which time it appeared to
“fire” a white beam of light at the ground. At about the same time, the seven
lights on the object’s leading edge suddenly dimmed and disappeared from the
witnesses’ sight. The object moved off in the general direction of Sky Harbor
International Airport, a few miles to the south, where it was witnessed by two
air traffic controllers in the airport tower, and reportedly by several pilots, both
on the ground and on final approach from the east.
After this point in the sighting, the facts are somewhat less clear to
investigators. It is known that at least one object continued generally to the
south and southeast, passing over the communities of Scottsdale, Glendale, and
Gilbert. One of the witnesses in Scottsdale, a former airline pilot with 13,700
hours of flight time, reported seeing the object execute a distinct turn as it
approached his position on the ground. He noted that he witnessed many lights
on the object as it approached him, but that the number of lights appeared to
diminish as it got closer to overhead. Many other witnesses in those
communities reported seeing the object pass overhead as it made its way
toward the mountains to the south of Phoenix.
Other sightings occurred shortly afterward along Interstate 10 in the vicinity
of Casa Grande. One family of five, who were driving from Tucson to Phoenix,
reported that the object that passed over their station wagon was so large that
they could see one “wing tip” of the object out one side of their car, and the
other “wing tip” out the other side. They estimated they were driving toward
Phoenix at approximately 80 miles per hour, and they remained underneath the
object for between one and two minutes as it moved in the opposite direction.
They emphasized how incredibly huge the object appeared to be as it blocked
out the sky above their car.
Many witnesses located throughout the Phoenix basin continued to report
objects and peculiar clusters of lights for several hours following the initial
sightings. One group of witnesses reported a large disk streaking westward over
Phoenix at high speed. Others reported peculiar orange “fireballs” which
appeared to hover in the sky even hours after the initial sightings.
One of the more intriguing reports was submitted by a young man who
claimed to be an Airman in the Air Force, stationed at Luke Air Force Base,
located to the west of Phoenix in Litchfield Park. He telephoned the National
UFO Reporting Center at 3:20 A.M. on Friday, some eight hours after the
sightings on the previous night, and reported that two USAF F-15 fighters had
been “scrambled” from Luke AFB, and had intercepted one of the objects.
Illustration by Robert Fairfax
Although the presence of F-15’s could never be confirmed, the airman

provided detailed information which proved to be accurate, based on what
investigators would reconstruct from witnesses over subsequent weeks and
months. Two days after his first telephone call, the airman called to report that
he had just been informed by his commander that he was being transferred to
an assignment in Greenland. He has never been heard from again since that
telephone call.
Most of the controversy that arose from the incident centers around a cluster
of lights that was seen, and videotaped, to the south of Phoenix at between 9:30
and 10:00 P.M. on the same night as the sightings. In May 1997, the Public
Affairs Office at Luke AFB announced that their personnel had investigated
these lights, and had established that they were flares launched from A-10
“Wart-hog” aircraft over the Gila Bend “Barry M. Goldwater” Firing Range at
approximately 10:00 P.M. Even the most implacable UFO skeptics admit,
however, that irrespective of whether such flares had in fact been launched or
not, they cannot serve as an explanation for the objects that had been witnessed
by many individuals some 1-2 hours earlier.
Another interesting aspect of the case is the virtual absence of coverage in
the print media, save for a handful of articles in local newspapers. The Prescott
Daily Courier carried an article on March 14, but the Phoenix newspapers, and
the national wire services, provided no early coverage of the event, even though
they had been apprised of it.
It was not until mid-June, almost ten weeks later, that the national press took
any interest in the incident with the appearance of a front-page article in USA
Today on June 18, 1997.
Investigators may never be able to reassemble all of the facts surrounding
the events that took place over Arizona on the night of March 13, 1997.
However, there is no doubt in the minds of most that what occurred was
extraordinarily bizarre in nature, and that many thousands of witnesses can
attest to the events.
photographs of UFOs Alleged UFO photographs have long been a source of

difficulties, as well as constituting an important supportive element in the case
for the UFO. Of the many hundreds of offerings received by private UFO
research groups and official agencies, most are utterly worthless for one or
more reasons: (1) The imagery is so poor that no meaningful information
content is present. (2) If a structural object does appear in the picture, the
circumstances surrounding the taking of the photograph are usually such that
fraud is either reasonably suspected or clearly evident. (3) Some vital element
(such as the original negative), which would aid in a more definitive analysis, is
usually missing. (4) The testimony of the photographer and/or supporting
witnesses may be internally inconsistent or not in agreement with features
observable in the photo(s). (5) Inconsistencies within the photo itself
suggesting a montage or double exposure, are often found.
Former assistant director of the now defunct National Investigations
Committee on Aerial Phenomena, Stuart Nixon, characterized the general
situation very well when he said: “…NICAP has never analyzed a structured-
object picture that is fully consistent with the claim an extraordinary flying
device was photographed. In every case, there has been some small detail, or
group of details, that raised the suspicion of a hoax or a mistake.”
One might easily conclude from all this that any and all photographs
purporting to show UFOs should be promptly and mercilessly rejected.
However, to do so might conceivably result in overlooking the genuine article
if and when it does happen along.
The samples chosen for the UFO Photo Gallery which follows are typical.
Included in this collection are “classics” from three categories: (1) allegedly
“real” UFOs that many UFOlogists believe could be extraterrestrial space
ships; (2) photos that are highly suspect but not proven to be false; and (3)
confessed or otherwise proven hoaxes.
Can you tell which is which? Who really knows?
—RONALD D. STORY
Piata Beach (Brazil) photos The following events reportedly happened on
the afternoon of April 24, 1959, as Sr. Helio Aguiar, a thirty-two-year-old
statistician employed by a bank in Bahia, Brazil, was riding his motorcycle
down the highway to Itapan. As he was passing Piata Beach, in the Amaralina
District, he noticed a silvery, domed disk, shaped something like a Cardinal’s
hat, with a number of “windows” visible around the base of the dome on top.
The underside of this object showed four strange markings, or symbols, faintly
visible in the photographs taken. (See Aguiar’s drawings superimposed on the
photographs.)
About that time, his motorcycle engine stopped and he got off to unpack his
camera. He adjusted it and took three quick shots as the object made a leisurely
sweeping turn (from the sea toward him) over the surf. He then began to feel a
strange pressure in his brain, and a state of progressive confusion overtook him.
He felt vaguely as though he was being ordered by somebody to write
something down. As he was winding the film to take a fourth picture, he lost all
sense of what was happening.
The next thing Aguiar knew, he was slumped over his motorcycle and the
UFO was gone. In his hand he held a piece of paper bearing a message in his
own handwriting. It said, “Put an absolute stop to all atomic tests for warlike
purposes. The balance of the universe is threatened. We shall remain vigilant
and ready to intervene.”
As he tried to recall the experience, he remembered that the craft was a dark
silvery metallic color, with a somewhat luminous orange-colored dome. The
“windows” were small and square, and appeared more like panels or ports
running around the base of the dome. There were three tubes, or rib-like
structures of some kind, running parallel from the dome to the edge of the disk
on one side; and it had four small semi-spherical protuberances on the
underside, equally spaced near the center of the disk. Three of the markings on
the underside of the flange of the disk were faintly distinguishable in the
photographs taken, but they do not conform to any symbol or language known
today.
Although the object moved in a sweeping curve in its flight path, it did not
seem to employ aerodynamic lift to remain aloft. When first seen, it was
traveling edge forward in a very steep bank, and then its position changed so
that in the last photo it is traveling dome forward in a maximum drag condition,
with the full area of the disk flat against its line of flight. Aguiar did not see it
leave.
Photo #1 Photo #2 Photo #3 Photo #4
The APRO (Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) photographic

consultant at the time, John Hopf, gave the following report:
“Working from the highly enlarged prints made from the original negatives,
it is quite certain that these are authentic photographs of an unconventional
aerial object actually over the water. By lining up the horizon as has been done
in the composite print, and assuming equal enlargement of the originals, the
apparent maneuver of the object may be noted. The apparent size of the object
increases from view No. I to view No. 3, indicating the object was approaching
the camera.
“In views Nos. 1 and 2 we seem to be looking at the bottom of the disk. The
spots (indentations or protrusions) are not distinct enough to determine their
nature and shadow effect from these is lost in the grain pattern.
“The altitude of the disk increased from view No. 3 to view No. 4 as the
water is no longer visible in the last view. Only the shiny central dome is
visible in this view. This may be due to the reflectivity matching that of the sky
and being concealed by the grain.”
As in most cases of alleged UFO photographs, the authenticity of the story

and accompanying photos is left open to debate.
—APRO
Pope, Nick (b. 1965). Nick Pope is a government employee in the British
Ministry of Defence. In 1991 he was posted to a division called Secretariat (Air
Staff), where for the next three years his job was to investigate UFO sightings
to see if there was evidence of any threat to the defense of the United Kingdom.
The job that he did was broadly analogous to the work done by the now defunct
USAF study, Project Blue Book. Through his official research and investigation
of the UFO phenomenon Pope became involved in related subjects such as
alien abductions, crop circles and animal mutilations.
When he was promoted in 1994, and moved to another position, he
continued his research privately, specializing in work with abductees.
Concerned by the defense and national security implications of the UFO
phenomenon he spoke out publicly, and wrote a book about his work, entitled
Open Skies, Closed Minds. Later, he wrote The Uninvited, dealing with alien
contact/abduction cases, and a speculative novel about alien invasion, entitled
Operation Thunder Child.
50 Hogarth Crescent
Merton Abbey
Address:
London SW19 2DW
U.K.
POSITION STATEMENT: On the basis of my official research and investigation

into UFO sightings and reports of alien contact, I am personally convinced that
intelligent extraterrestrials are visiting the Earth. I say this on the basis of the
data available to me at the Ministry of Defence, both in terms of the historic
records and the several hundred new cases that I investigated each year.
While around ninety five percent of sightings could be explained in terms of
misidentifications of known objects and phenomena, there was a hard core of
cases that defied any conventional explanation and involved craft capable of
speeds and maneuvers beyond the capabilities of our own technology. I was
particularly interested in UFO sightings that could be correlated by radar and in
reports where the witnesses were military personnel; such cases were directly
responsible for my gradual conversion from skeptic to believer.
Nick Pope
Although a supporter of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, I am wary of the

UFOlogical obsession with official cover-ups and conspiracies. I generally find
such ideas to be unconvincing and ill-informed. While excited by the
possibility of open contact with extraterrestrials, my defense background has
instilled me with a natural caution, and I believe that governments should make
some contingency plans for such a scenario, not least to counter the potential
biological hazard that may stem from such contact.
It seems to me that UFOlogists need to adopt more of an empirical,
methodological approach to their work, and should try to get away from the
believer versus skeptic mindset. Bridges need to be built with the scientific
community, not least because undisputed proof that we are not alone in the
universe is more likely to come from optical or radio astronomy than from
UFOlogy.
—NICK POPE
Portage County (Ohio) police chase One of the most dramatic encounters
by police officers with an apparently structured, low-level UFO occurred in the
early morning of April 17, 1966. Officers of the Portage County, Ohio,
Sheriff’s Department first saw the object rise up from near ground level,
bathing them in light, near Ravenna, Ohio, about 5 A.M. Ordered by the sergeant
to pursue the object, they chased it for eighty-five miles across the border into
Pennsylvania, as it seemed to play a cat-and-mouse game with them. Along the
route, police officers from other jurisdictions also saw the object and joined in
the chase.
Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur and Mounted Deputy Wilbur “Barney” Neff had
left their scout car to investigate an apparently abandoned automobile on Route
224. Spaur described the first sighting in these words:
“I always look behind me so no one can come up behind me. And when I
looked in this wooded area behind us, I saw this thing. At this time it was
coming up…to about treetop level, I’d say about one hundred feet. It started
moving toward us….As it came over the trees, I looked at Barney and he was
still watching the car…and he didn’t say nothing and the thing kept getting
brighter and the area started to get light…. I told him to look over his shoulder,
and he did.
“He just stood there with his mouth open for a minute, as bright as it was,
and he looked down. And I started looking down and I looked at my hands and
my clothes weren’t burning or anything, when it stopped, right over on top of
us. The only thing, the only sound in the whole area was a hum…like a
transformer being loaded or an overloaded transformer when it changes….
“I was petrified, and, uh, so I moved my right foot, and everything seemed
to work all right. And evidently he made the same decision I did, to get
something between me and it, or us and it, or whatever you would say. So we
both went for the car, we got to the car and we sat there….”
The UFO as sketched by Deputy Spaur
As they watched, the UFO moved toward the east, and then stopped again.
Spaur picked up the microphone and reported it to the dispatcher. At this time,
the object was about 250 feet away, brilliantly lighting up the area (“It was very
bright; it’d make your eyes water,” Spaur said.) Sergeant Schoen-felt, on duty
at the station, told them to follow it and keep it under observation while they
tried to get a photo unit to the scene.
Spaur and Neff turned south on Route 183, then back east on Route 224,
which placed the object to their north, out the left window. “At this time,” said
Spaur, “it came straight south, just one motion, buddy, just a smooth glide…”
and began moving east with them pacing it, just to their right at an estimated
altitude of 300-500 feet, illuminating the ground beneath it. Once more the
UFO darted to the north, now left of the car, and they sped up to over 100 mph
to keep up with it.
As the sky became lighter with predawn light, Spaur and Neff saw the UFO
in silhouette, with a vertical projection at its rear. The object began to take on a
metallic appearance as the chase continued. Spaur kept up a running
conversation with other police cars that were trying to catch up with them.
Once when they made a wrong turn at an intersection, the object stopped, then
turned and came back to their position.
Police Officer Wayne Huston of Fast Palestine, Ohio, situated near the
Pennsylvania border, had been monitoring the radio broadcasts and was parked
at an intersection he knew the Portage County officers would be passing soon.
Shortly afterward he saw the UFO pass by with the sheriff’s cruiser in hot
pursuit. He swung out and joined the chase. At Conway, Pennsylvania, Spaur
spotted another parked police car and stopped to enlist his aid, since their
cruiser was almost out of gas. The Pennsylvania officer called his dispatcher.
According to Spaur, as the four officers stood and watched the UFO, which
had stopped and was hovering, there was traffic on the radio about jets being
scrambled to chase the UFO, and “…we could see these planes coming
in….When they started talking about fighter planes, it was just as if that thing
heard every word that was said; it went PSSSSHHEW, straight up; and I mean
when it went up, friend, it didn’t play no games; it went straight up.”
The Air Force later “identified” the UFO as a satellite, seen part of the time,
and confused with the planet Venus. Under pressure from Ohio officials, Major
Hector Quintanilla, chief of Project Blue Book, had an acrimonious
confrontation with the witnesses and refused to change the identification,
although it was pointed out to him that they had seen the UFO in addition to
Venus and the moon at the conclusion of the observation. Major Quintanilla
also denied that any jets had been scrambled.
William B. Weitzel conducted an exhaustive investigation on behalf of the
National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), obtaining
taped interviews, signed statements, sketches, and all pertinent data, which was
assembled into a massive report that was made available to congressional
investigators. When the University of Colorado UFO Project was initiated in
1966, a copy of Weitzel’s report was hand- delivered to the director, Dr.
Edward U. Condon, for his consideration. The Condon Report, published two
years later, does not mention the case.
—RICHARD HALL
powerlessness The vitality of the UFO mythos lies in its presumption that
there exists a higher power in the external world that is able to provoke fear and
desire due to the alien’s ability to command forces that man does not. The
existence of a futuristic technology that, at our level of development, appears
supernatural and magical is a necessary premise in the argument that
extraterrestrials are able to cross vast distances of space to visit our world. Such
a power could in principle render the most powerful individuals subservient
and all of us would, in principle, be vulnerable to their will.
In this minimal respect, UFO belief is analogous to religion and supernatural
beliefs such as witchcraft that premise the existence of animistic forces greater
than oneself. Such beliefs can be useful in fantasy by allowing oneself to
believe that one is a victim of willful intention rather than blind randomness,
thus imparting meaning and drama to misfortunes.
The dominant emotion in UFO encounters tends to be fear. (Moravec, 1987)
When one is present, chaos reigns. Witnesses are paralyzed. Vehicles lose
power. Television and radio is disrupted. Animals go crazy. Power grids black
out. Fires erupt. Things fall apart. Abductions also tend to be nightmarish
horrors in which the victim feels powerless. Pain is ubiquitous. The aliens come
from dying worlds. The government and sinister Men in Black try to cover up
the truth. The end of the world or some similar cataclysm is nigh. While Jung
suggested UFOs might be mandalas and thus symbols of wholeness, the
presence of tranquil emotions are strikingly rare and decisively refute the idea
that the circularity of saucers is due to desires for order.
Studies of UFO belief repeatedly implicate the frustration of the will to
power, i.e., the generalized drive to dominate and master. Walter Kaufman’s
treatment of Nietzsche’s formulation of the concept is recommended for a full
exposition. (Kaufman, 1980) Stephen P. Resta’s study found strength of UFO
belief is well correlated with externality—a generalized attitude that one has
little control over one’s life. (Resta, 1975) Resta also tested for anomie and did
find a correlation. This would be consistent with paranoia. Paranoia acts as a
defense against depression and meaninglessness.
There is a significant correlation between UFO belief and belief in witches,
necromancy, and ghosts. (Zusne and Jones, 1982) Witchcraft in some form is
found in all societies and practiced most avidly by those lacking, but desiring,
power.
Donald Warren’s Gallup poll analysis found elevated levels of UFO belief
among individuals who failed to achieve the economic level of status that their
education would lead society to expect of them. (Warren, 1970)
References
Moravec, Mark. “UFOs as Psychological and Parapsychological Phenomena” in Evans, Hilary, ed. UFOs:
1947-1987: The 40-Year Search for an Explanation (Fortean Times, 1988).
Kaufman, Walter. Discovering the Mind, Volume 2 (McGraw-Hill, 1980).
Resta, Stephen P. “The relationship of anomie and externality to the strength of belief in Unidentified
Flying Objects” (dissertation, Loyola College Graduate School, Baltimore, Maryland, 30 October
1975).
Zusne, Leonard and Jones, Warren H. Anomalistic Psychology (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982).
Warren, Donald. “Status Inconsistency Theory and Flying Saucer Sightings” Science (November 6, 1970).
Principle of Mediocrity The Principle (or assumption) of Mediocrity (also

known as the Copernican Principle) holds that conditions favorable for the
evolution of life and intelligence are prevalent throughout the universe. The
implication is that intelligent life is common, not rare, and thus we humans are
not so special.
The Principle of Mediocrity is basically the reverse of the Anthropic
Principle, according to which we humans may be the only case of intelligent
life in the universe. However, just as Copernicus dislodged us from the center
of the solar system, the Principle of Mediocrity goes hand-in-hand with the
Principle of Uniformity of Nature in assuming that the same laws of nature and
natural processes that produced intelligent life on Earth are typical, not
exceptional, undermining the age-old religious principle of Special Creation.
—RONALD D. STORY
Prison Earth theory Though rarely considered in serious discussions of the
nature of the relationship of Earth to the rest of life in the cosmos, the idea that
the Earth is a prison has had a minor notoriety. One could hear it now and again
on talk shows during the fifties and sixties perhaps as an effort to show an
urbane wittiness of the Mark Twain sort. At some point, it seemed to sink into
obscurity. Yet the idea developed a respectable pedigree along the way that
deserves mention.
One can find the idea in the UFO literature as early as the first saucerzine
from 1953, Al Bender’s Space Review. Bender called upon people to send in
their theories on what flying saucers were all about and he made up a list of the
responses. As part of Theory No. 11 Harold F. Emridh of Kansas wrote, “I
think the saucers are to keep us imprisoned on Earth until we civilize ourselves
to the point where we no longer pose a threat to them.”
In a book written with Ouija board contactee George Hunt Williamson,
UFOs Confidential (1958), John McCoy offered his opinion that Earth is a
“prison world” or a “great lunatic asylum.” Man has lost awareness of reality
and has been given the illusion of freedom. Our desires are controlled by our
system of economics and the inculcation of materialistic goals. This
enslavement is accomplished by the trick of putting children in physical
education classes. Its regimentation and excitation of savage instincts levels
delicate and creative genius. This Earth is controlled by a great force from the
deceptive aliens of Orion.
Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers—Top Secret (1960) briefly puts forward
the notion that aliens are here to keep tabs on a colony that was deliberately
abandoned. It was a means of getting rid of undesirables. With Earth acting as a
Devil’s Island, these exiles would serve as examples for others at home to stay
in line. This would serve to explain the human appearance of many UFOnauts,
particularly in that period.
Ray Palmer, in the January 1959 issue of Search, relayed the probably
facetious contact tale of Art LaVove that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
The InterGalactic Empire banished rebels who destroyed a base beyond Mars.
They were lobotomised and consigned to a life of savagery on Earth. Ever
since, the Empire has sent its lobotomised prisoners here on a daily basis. “All
of the aberrated of the Cosmos are dispatched here, where they can be watched.
To put it bluntly, this planet is an IGE nut-house.” Palmer granted it was likely
that this was only a cleverly conceived fiction, but that it nevertheless matched
his personal beliefs. He thought LaVove “may have uttered the prize truth of all
time.”
Jan Hudson in Those Sexy Saucer People (1967) admits arriving
independently at a similar theory. Believing UFOs showed up after we sent off
H-bombs or took off for space travel, she offered this thought, “I think the earth
is a giant institution in which the human race has been incarcerated for its own
good. And every time we start rattling the bars, the keeps come hurrying down
to take a look.” Hudson relates that when she offered this idea before a group of
contactees, none seemed to care for it much. It’s hard to know why, but maybe
it had something to do with the fact that George Adamski and Orfeo Angelucci
had both testified to the truth of the Prison Earth theory well before, in the
middle of the fifties.
A Saturnian named Ramu told George Adamski during a conversation in a
café that Earth had been selected centuries ago as the system to which they
would exile their troublemakers. “They were gathered in ships from the many
planets and transported to Earth, without equipment or implements of any
kind.” Here they were forced to work and draw on their talents to earn their
place in the Creator’s fold. The extraterrestrials watch and send messiahs from
time to time to help out, but man wars against man and his achievements are
lost to his penchant for destruction.
Orfeo Angelucci’s astral contacts revealed that vast numbers of earthlings
are former inhabitants of the world of Lucifer that once existed between Mars
and Jupiter. Those responsible for the destruction of Lucifer were deep-
drowned in time and matter to live in the “underworld of illusion” that makes
up the Earth. Flying saucers still visit “our prison world” to liberate us
spiritually.
The theory makes an odd brief return in abduction history. During a 1974
visit to another world, Carl Higdon recalled seeing a gray-haired man among
some younger people that aliens had picked up. He seemed familiar as a guy he
saw on a TV show called The Unknown. During the show, this man said of the
UFO people, “They put us down here for punishment. They’re going to come
and take us back.” Leo Sprinkle, who performed the regression, realizes he
knows who Higdon is talking about, “I have a copy of the book that the man is
talking about, saying that the Earth was like a prison.” (Haines, 1979) Later, it
comes to him: Lawrence W. Foreman’s Passport to Eternity (1970). Foreman
was a southern Californian who had gone out into the desert on several
occasions and talked with people from flying saucers. There is no indication if
the investigators tried to contact Foreman about Higdon’s corroboration of his
relationship with UFOnauts or if Sprinkle simply discounted the claim out of
disinterest in helping prove the Prison Earth theory.
The theory was toyed with in science fiction culture well before it showed
up in UFO literature. Frank Belknap Long Jr.’s “Exiles of the Stratosphere”
involved an advanced race with lighter-than-air vessels dwelling in the upper
atmosphere that only sent outcasts to the surface. In A.E. van Vogt’s Asylum
(1942) the Earth is a sort of Botany Bay or dumping ground for the vicious
elements of the galaxy. And before science fiction there was religion. George
Berkeley’s Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732) contains the opinion
“the Earth is, after all, the prison house in God’s Kingdom.”
Palmer warned the Prison Earth theory was a dangerous idea and so it is. It
explains the problem of suffering all too well. The world should be a good
place. Life should be fair. So why isn’t it? Any answer is going to be
mythological in character, if not in form. The venerable orthodox choices are
original sin and karma. We are cursed by the actions of our ancestors or our
forgotten selves. Prison Earth did not change this. Adamski blamed ancestors.
Angelucci blamed our forgotten selves. The clarification is one of setting.
Prisons are supposed to be cruel, so no wonder there is so much insanity and
suffering in the world.
So far so good, yet it also explains the problem of noncontact all too well.
Aliens avoid us because we are useless misfits, the scum of the galaxy. We are
ultimately beyond reasoning with and do not deserve to be free. Take that
message to heart and you are asking for an inferiority complex of cosmic
dimensions. You are free to believe it if you wish, just don’t forget that any bars
to this prison are metaphorical and not metallic.
References
Haines, Richard, ed., UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (Scarecrow Press, 1979).
Problem of Noncontact Of all the arguments against the presence of

extraterrestrial visitors, the Problem of Noncontact has been the most
frequently advanced and most respected among disbelievers. Charles Fort
posed the issue in counterpoint to his own speculations about extraterrestrials
decades before people started arguing about the source of flying saucers. This
version from a 1926 letter to The New York Times would still be acceptable to
most skeptics: “Then why have they not landed, say in Central Park, and had a
big time of it—monstrous parade down Broadway, historic turn out, eruptions
of confetti.” (Fort, 1926)
Later writers play around with landing spots in other places like the White
House lawn, M.I.T., or Hollywood, but the basic sensibility retained is that they
should be open about their activities rather than behave in a furtive and
secretive manner. A roster of critics who have accepted the compelling nature
of the Problem of Noncontact includes James Lipp of Project Sign, Arthur C.
Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Donald Menzel, Peter Kor, Robert Plank, John Keel,
William Markowitz, and Robert Sheaffer.
UFOlogists tend to be dismissive of the problem, characterizing it in such
terms as “a homocentric fallacy of the most obvious nature” embodying “more
whimsy than good reasoning” (McCampbell); “an arbitrary desire” intended to
demean UFOs as imaginary (Hendry) or “irrelevant” (Hopkins). Another
considers the idea as being “on extremely thin ice” since nobody has done a
concerted study forecasting the social characteristics of advanced civilizations
(Baker).
Stanton Friedman engages the argument in a more elite manner. He felt the
intent of the aliens is “not to seek out lunch with loonies of earth but rather to
get data at their leisure without much risk.” He doubts that “the Margaret
Meads of Zeta Reticuli” would care to live with a people who have “made such
a mess of a nice planet.” Such remarks would ring truer had UFOnauts
repeatedly shown a lack of social discernment.
Though the class of people abducted by aliens are generally not the sort seen
on the Jerry Springer Show, high-status or highbrow folks are not much in
evidence. The aliens clearly favor those who entertain New Age concepts, such
as alternate realities, telepathy, and cosmic consciousness. The reckless driving
habits of UFOnauts and their evident problems with clunky vessels that spit
smoke and flame, and often need repair, raises doubts that they truly operate by
the motto, “Safety First.”
Advanced medical technology should assuage anxieties over the violent
tendencies of humans and their planet-wrecking ten dencies. Even if it would
not, is safety truly enhanced by not openly declaring that their intentions are
anthropological or otherwise innocuous? Secretive and furtive behavior
normally elicits suspicion and taunts of having something to hide.
In the years since Friedman’s remarks, developments in abduction lore have
given force to the presumption that aliens are in fact evil. Thus, we could
account for Noncontact by fears of reprisal in some form, or perhaps even
shame. The huge investment of resources required to construct and propel
interstellar crafts, however, renders all motives of alien self-interest
paradoxical. Few things on Earth are worth going light years and expending
energy sufficient to power a civilization for years. It is scarcely conceivable
that any genetic or medical problem supposedly motivating the Hybrid Program
wouldn’t be more quickly and efficiently solved by diverting space program
funds directly into medical and genetic research in situ. Even if we could
puzzle out the motive for such evil, this explanation would apply to only a
fraction of cases. Do we assume those aliens who collect rocks and pick
flowers are also evil?
Such dilemmas apply to other explanations of extraterrestrial behavior.
Stanton Friedman was able to think of some twenty-six reasons why aliens
might decide to visit Earth. When you ponder them at length however, only two
of them have any potential of accounting for the furtive nature of the UFO
phenomenon: Aliens scouting Earth for future invasion is one. Using Earth as a
honeymoon hideaway is the other. Extrapolating human modesty to
extraterrestrials seems questionable, but let’s allow it. The immediate dilemma
facing these motives is that the behaviors of UFO entities en masse do not
really seem to be guided by such motives.
What sort of invasion scout does medical exams? Abductees rarely seem to
come from positions of status or have jobs privy to important information.
Infiltrating libraries and publishing houses would efficiently get you most of
what abductees know. Worse, saucers have been around over fifty years, which
would seem to be procrastination on a rather unlikely scale. Information
gathered during the 1950s would be obsolete and of no use for any invasion
now.
Villas Boas-type affairs are not the rule in UFO stories. One may well
wonder if sex under Saturn’s rings might be more romantic than Earth’s
mosquito-infested tropics, but tastes are such an individual matter we should
not assume universality. More troubling, though, should be the absence of hints
that aliens savor the chosen environment after the trysts are over—no hand in
hand walks on a beach, skipping stones, playful chases around the trees, taking
pictures. How about taking souvenirs or teleporting tourist knik-knaks? Given
the distance they must have traveled, why don’t they show more interest in
where they have come?
The most common argument made in response to the Problem of Noncontact
is to point out that superhuman thought and the effects of an independent
evolutionary and cultural history would inevitably render aliens, in part or
wholly, incomprehensible. This is perfectly true. Consider, as proof, one of the
great unsolved mysteries of human evolution—our love for music. There is no
widely accepted theory to explain the emotional effect music has on man.
Certainly there are no grounds to assume the music sense has a universal
survival value that would cause it to arise on alien worlds. It would be
miraculous if aliens could fathom the meaning music holds for humans and
trying to work out music’s logic would be nonsensical even in principle for it
plays on emotions rather than reason. Yet we put music on the Voyager probes
for distant interstellar civilizations to find and puzzle over. Given our own
behavior, one cannot disagree aliens will be capable of mystifying behavior.
To say this however is not the same thing as explaining away noncontact.
While we can nonimagine reasons for noncontact, one is equally justified in
nonimagining reasons aliens would make contact. The issue then turns on
deciding the likelihood that all aliens would adhere to philosophies, however
inscrutable, mandating non-contact to the exclusion of pro-contact
philosophies. Charles Fort demonstrated his reflective nature by seeing this
broader and deadlier version of the Problem of Noncontact: “The greatest of
mysteries: Why don’t they ever come here or send here openly? Of course there
is nothing to this mystery if we don’t take seriously the notion that we must be
interesting. It’s probably for moral reasons they stay away—but even so there
must be some degraded ones among them.”
As he states elsewhere, there must be “many different kinds of visitors to
this earth as there are visitors to New York, to a jail, to a church—some persons
go to church to pick pockets for instance.”
So where are the degraded aliens? It violates what we see every day about
life, society, culture, and intellectual discourse to expect radical uniformity
among extraterrestrials.
Just within the sphere of the scrutable, there seems to be no reason to avoid
contact that could gain likely universal assent. Take the oft-cited example of
Star Trek’s Prime Directive—aliens refrain from interfering in the affairs of
other cultures to prevent culture shock or contaminating the natural
development of the subject culture. It is a romantic notion charged with
allusions to clashes of culture within human history. Many had horrid
consequences—disease, butchery, slavery, erasure of cultural history. Yet not all
contacts were disastrous. One has only to think of the legacy of immigration in
New York City. Sure there were conflicts, yet the resulting hybrid has been a
jewel of American culture. It is hardly certain alien worlds would all have
brutal histories, nor that brutality would lead to the lesson of the Prime
Directive. An imperial-minded culture might opt for a let-the-dice-roll-and-see-
who-wins philosophy that takes any result of interaction as, metaphysically, all
the best in the long run.
It should be remembered that the heroes of the Star Trek universe repeatedly
void the Prime Directive in favor of saving lives, subverting tyranny, and
allaying suffering. They even dismantle utopias for notions about the need for
people to achieve and struggle to be human.
Noninterference is not nearly as elementary an ethical dictate as others like
cooperation or love. One can imagine precepts of cooperative tolerance that
would mandate interaction between alien worlds to learn from each other to
increase their mutual survival and well-being and pleasure. A sharing of the
best of all worlds is an aim even an advocate of self-interest could justify.
One could equally see how extraterrestrials might be guided by love and
thus seek to alleviate suffering and cultivate joy on other worlds. To put things
in their starkest terms, one can procure from theodicy, religion’s biggest
headache—The Problem of Suffering—and transplant it to the question of the
existence of god-like extraterrestrial civilizations: If extraterrestrials exist, why
do humans suffer needlessly?
Scrutable reasons for contact or nonfurtiveness can take many forms besides
love. Some possibilities that present themselves: hunting and fishing, art trade
and instruction, antique-hunting, attention-seeking, power-seeking,
entertainment, lawsuits against humans, sports, the offering of services
(interstellar taxi), impartial police protection (The Day the Earth Stood Still),
famine relief, exile of undesirables, erotic adventure, eccentric obsession with
alien life, playfulness, tourism, territorial displays.
We dare not forget Charles Fort’s awful thought: “Why not missionaries sent
here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and
to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and superwhiskies…” Add to
this the set of motives that aliens might have for contact beyond our
comprehension and you have a conception of the magnitude the Problem of
Noncontact presents to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The odds that all possible
visiting extraterrestrials would be philosophically opposed to contact seems
thoroughly remote.
Parenthetically, it must be observed that if one believes the evidence for an
extraterrestrial presence is too extraordinary to reject even in the face of innate
implausibility, there are implications that the ETH advocate is obliged to come
to terms with. If UFOs are real, the cosmos is barren. There is no diversity. The
cosmos is home to entities with only a narrow range of behaviors.
Similarly, there are no aliens in any reasonable sense analogous to humanity.
The startling corollary stares back: Only Humans Love. Does that sound
arrogant? Yet consider, aliens capable of deep empathy would not fly around
indifferent to the troubles of humanity. They would make contact and help. If
you wish to affirm the ETH is valid, understand that the heavens are sending
only creeps our way. We either have incredibly bad luck or there is no variety
of life-forms blooming in the vast depths of space. The universe does not know
how to throw a good party.
In fairness, Charles Fort did proffer a way around the paradoxical absence of
degraded aliens. “We are property,” he wrote. The degraded ones are warned
off. This reduces some of the problems posed by the expectation of diversity,
but hardly eliminates it. Unless we can reduce the number of owners to one
individual being or a small family, the problem still hangs on in the dynamics
of groups. The range of forms suggested by the UFO phenomenon doesn’t
really support such an idea as a single owner. There is also a problem that
philosophies usually evolve or degrade over time. People change their minds
once in a while. Thus, even evidence for a single owner would raise issues of
how noncontact should last over the whole of UFO history.
There is a temptation to extrapolate territorial behavior found in many
species to the realms of outer space to buttress the property thesis. Here, the
difficulty is that territoriality is typically directed to forms of one’s own species.
It would limit noncontact only within one species of aliens, not many, as UFO
lore tends to favor. Property is also not a cultural universal. Many alien cultures
quite possibly would not recognize the idea of property and ignore warnings
not to trespass.
There is then the question of whether the owners would feel the Earth is
worth defending against other aliens. UFO behavior gives no evidence that
resources are being exploited. No special care is lavished on humans or other
animals leading to doubts about us being regarded as highly valued. There is no
blatant evidence of cultivation, weeding, domestication, or artificial breeding
on a planetary scale.
Having granted that UFOnauts seem indifferent to the state of human life
leads naturally to a different explanation that has been advanced to explain
noncontact. Maybe technologically advanced life evolves to a higher plane of
existence. All their desires are taken care of eventually and they live in a state
of perpetual satisfaction due to the march of technological advance and
scientific inquiry. Maybe they are gods of their own realms and no longer
notice, let alone care about, those beings more primitive than themselves. This
can be justified by analogy to the universal indifference humans have towards
protozoa.
This could work for Fermi’s Paradox—the absence of aliens on Earth
despite a fecund cosmos—but this is less than compelling when applied to the
UFO phenomenon. The universe is far too big for aliens to arrive here
randomly. Some motive must target them into the onionskin of Earth’s
atmosphere. When we see alien theme parks scudding along the rings of Saturn,
then talk of indifference will make some sense. Needless to say, the many
abduction stories of aliens examining humans do not support the notion of
indifference either.
Ultimately, one can never escape the fact that the problem of no degraded
aliens lies in the shadows of any variation of the ETH that can be offered.
There are just too many possibilities in a universe full of life. The Problem of
Noncontact can only be defeated if the UFO phenomenon changes radically
and strips away from its label the prefix un-. If aliens identify themselves and
make open contact then the problem goes away. Until then, UFOlogists will
keep encountering it.
References
Asimov, Isaac. “The Rocketing Dutchmen” in The Planet That Wasn’t (Avon, 1976).
Baker, Robert M. L. and McDonald, James. Symposium on UFOs—Hearings Before the Committee on
Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, 90th Congress, 2nd session, July 29, 1968.
Clarke, Arthur C. “Last Words on UFOs” in The View from Serendip (Ballantine, 1978).
Fort, Charles. “Have Martians Visited Us? British Observer Argues in the Affirmative and Seeks News of
Future Manifestations” (The New York Times, September 5, 1926).
Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned (Ace Star, undated; originally published by Boni & Liveright,
1919).
Friedman, Stanton. “A Scientific Approach to Flying Saucer Behavior” (Thesis-Antithesis, AIAA Los
Angeles, no date).
Hendry, Allan. The UFO Handbook (Doubleday, 1979).
Keel, John. Why UFOs? (Manor Books, 1970).
Klass, Philip. UFOs Identified (Random House, 1968).
Kor, Peter. “Saucer Clubs—20th Century Cults” (Flying Saucers, October 1961).
Lipp, James. Appendix D of Project Sign, December 13, 1948.
Markowitz, William. “The Physics and Metaphysics of UFOs” (Science, September 15, 1967).
McCampbell, James M. UFOlogy (Celestial Arts, 1976).
Menzel, Donald. Flying Saucers (Harvard University Press, 1953).
Plank, Robert. The Emotional Significance of Imaginary Beings (1968).
Sheaffer, Robert. The UFO Verdict (Prometheus, 1981).
Program for Extraordinary Experience Research, The (PEER) PEER

was founded in 1993 by Harvard professor of psychiatry John E. Mack, M.D.
to formalize his study of reported alien encounters and other experiences that
seem at odds with the Western worldview. PEER’s work is motivated by the
understanding that expansions of human knowledge come with the exploration
of unexplained phenomena.
PEER’s mission is to explore and integrate extraordinary experiences within
a context of personal, societal, and global transformation. This comprehensive
vision and integrative approach has evolved from the understanding that no
single field or human perspective can account for the anomalies we are
encountering in our research.
PEER is a project of the Center for Psychology and Social Change. Through
the Center’s twenty-year history, we have been committed to the exploration,
understanding, and integration of personal and collective identity: tribal (ethno-
national conflict), species (human potential), interspecies (relationship with
Earth’s ecosystem), and cosmic (relationships with intelligences in the
universe).
PEER’s knowledge of the exploration, integration, and application of
experiences not readily understood is called upon as a resource by diverse
groups. PEER representatives have been invited to speak to and educate
political, religious, and spiritual leaders about extraordinary experiences and
their relationship to social, environmental, economic, spiritual, epistemological,
and ontological matters. These relationships and initiatives may, we feel,
ultimately have a great impact on our society, encouraging others to reconsider
their views of the universe in which we live.
P.O. Box 398080
Address: Cambridge, MA 02139
U.S.A.
E-mail: peer@peermack.org
Web site: www.peermack.org

Project Blue Book For over twenty years, the U. S. Air Force was charged
with investigating and evaluating UFO reports brought to its attention in the
United States and at U.S. bases, stations, or property in other countries. Project
Blue Book was the responsible unit within the Air Force during most of that
period-from 1952 until the end of 1969.
The first UFO project, located within the Air Technical Intelligence Center
(ATIC) of Air Matériel Command, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton,
Ohio, was Pro- ject Sign, created in January 1948, with a Restrictied
classification. It was replaced by Project Grudge in February 1949. While
Project Sign had reportedly suffered from an internal ideological battle
concerning the origin or cause of UFO reports, Project Grudge took a more
negative approach to the question and soon became a relatively dormant
operation. The project was revitalized under the direction of Captain Edward J.
Ruppelt, and the new, unofficial code name of Blue Book was assigned to it.
Most of this early history of the Air Force involvement with UFOs is known
through a book authored by Ruppelt (see The Report on Unidentified Flying
Objects, 1956), and much of what he wrote has since been verified by
declassified Air Force documents.
Ruppelt was a World War II veteran who had returned to active duty during
the Korean conflict. With a degree in aeronautical engineering, he was assigned
to ATIC and was involved in the analysis of the Soviet MIG-15 jet fighter.
According to Ruppelt, ATIC was ordered to undertake a new study of the UFO
situation at a special Pentagon meeting in September of 1950, during the
Grudge dormancy. The study report was delivered to General John Samford,
the new director of Air Force Intelligence, by Ruppelt and Colonel Frank Dunn,
the head of ATIC, in December of 1951. Ruppelt was then assigned to
reactivate the project, and the name was changed to Blue Book. Under
Ruppelt’s direction, Blue Book grew into a better-organized unit, but over the
next two years, it was barely able to handle the volume of reports it received for
analysis and, sometimes, additional investigation. It was during Ruppelt’s
tenure that some of the most famous incidents in UFO history occurred, such as
the Lubbock Lights, the Washington National radar/visual reports, and the
Robertson Panel meeting. Ruppelt was responsible for briefing the Robertson
Panel members on the then-classified UFO material.
After retiring from the Air Force, Ruppelt wrote his book detailing the
history of Air Force involvement with UFOs up to that time, and it has since
become a classic in the UFO literature. The book took a positive approach,
leaving the reader with the impression that Ruppelt accepted the reality of
UFOs. A subsequent edition of the book, published in 1960, included three
new chapters, and Ruppelt seemed to have considerably mellowed his
enthusiasm. Perhaps this was due to the increasing contactee claims, or perhaps
to the attacks being directed at the Air Force by the newly created National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). As Ruppelt was an
engineer at Northrop Corporation at the time, some writers have speculated that
the Air Force, embarrassed by the first edition of Ruppelt’s book, applied
pressure on Northrop, a large Air Force contractor, to have him update the book
with a more negative conclusion. No evidence for this has ever surfaced.
Ruppelt died in 1960.
After Ruppelt’s departure from Blue Book, the operation was directed
during the 1950s and 1960s by Captain Charles Hardin (1954-56), Captain
George T. Gregory (1956-58), Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Robert J.
Friend (1958-63), and Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Hector Quintanilla, Jr.
(1963-69). The project never again enjoyed the large staff and support of the
Ruppelt days.
Indeed, under the premise that there was no real underlying, unconventional
phenomenon behind UFO reports, its new, low-key operational approach was
changed to that of explaining as many reports as possible by any means
possible, preferably without additional investigation. Exceptions were made in
special instances, particularly in cases that received widespread publicity, and
the Air Force, as a public relations measure, had to “show the flag.” Thus, Blue
Book became little more than an Air Force showpiece, always subject to the
political needs of senior Air Force officers in the Pentagon, who, in turn, were
subject to pressures from the press, the public, and even the Congress.
The scientific community generally did not involve itself in the controversy,
erroneously assuming that the Air Force had a dynamic research project
underway. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book’s scientific consultant, who had been
retained originally under Project Sign, was not always happy with Blue Book’s
approach, but he felt that directly confronting the Air Force would serve little
purpose. Other pressures on the Air Force came from Donald Menzel, a well-
known Harvard astronomer, who dismissed the entire business as nonsense,
and, at the other extreme, NICAP, which lobbied actively in Congress and had
some influence on the press.
It was in the mid-1960s that the UFO controversy again climaxed, with
highly publicized sightings, accusations against Air Force secrecy, and/or
incompetence by the press and some members of Congress (including
Representative Gerald Ford), and, finally, the awarding of an Air Force contract
to the University of Colorado to conduct an independent, two-year study.
During that period, Blue Book (formally known as the Aerial Phenomena
Branch) was located within ATIC’s successor, the Foreign Technology Division
(FMD), Systems Command (still at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base), and was
directed by Major Quintanilla, who held a degree in physics. His staff
consisted of a lieutenant, a sergeant, and a secretary.
Many observers believed that the Blue Book staff was intellectually unable
to handle some of the new, challenging cases, such as the Exeter, New
Hampshire, and Portage County (Ravenna, Ohio) sightings, resulting in further
embarrassing confrontations with the press and the private UFO organizations.
After 1966, the University of Colorado UFO Project relieved the pressure
considerably. The university’s Condon Report, released publicly in early 1969,
recommended the closing of Project Blue Book. A March 1969 meeting in
Washington, D.C., attended by officers from Systems Command, Air Defense
Command, and Air Force Headquarters, resulted in the decision to close the
operation permanently, and the termination was announced on December
17,1969, by Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans, Jr. In a
memorandum to the Air Force Chief of Staff, General John D. Ryan, Dr.
Seamans stated that Blue Book could no longer “be justified either on the
ground of national security or in the interest of science.”
The Air Force’s final statistical breakdown, released soon afterward by the
Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information (SAFOI), gave a total of
12,618 UFO reports in Blue Book files, 701 of which remained unidentified.
Numerous private UFO researchers have claimed that many more of the reports
should have been carried as unidentified, and some unidentifieds are actually
easy to explain, indicating, at least in some instances (according to these
observers), arbitrary assignments of labels.
In the SAFOI release, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Aikman stated, among
other things, that no UFO had ever “…given any indication of threat to our
national security…” and that “…there has been no evidence submitted to or
discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as ‘unidentified’
represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of
present-day scientific knowledge.” These statements were identical, word for
word, to the periodic Air Force UFO releases throughout the 1950s and 1960s,
which were based on the terminology of the 1953 Robertson Panel report.
Most of the Blue Book files were declassified and retired to the Air Force
Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Alabama, where several academic
researchers obtained access to them. They were subsequently transferred to the
Modern Mihtary Branch of the National Archives, in Washington, D.C., where
public access to them is granted.
Over the years, numerous claims have been made that Project Blue Book
was merely a “front” for a secret and more sophisticated Air Force or Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation. Some observers have even proposed that
Blue Book staff members were innocent “pawns,” who were totally unaware of
the ultrasecret laboratories where the real “good” UFO material was sent.
Despite all the claims, no hard evidence has ever been produced to support this.
In fact, as Air Force personnel were subject to AFR 200-2 (and amendments),
which required all UFO reports and material be transmitted to ATIC and, later,
FTD, and as AFR 200-2 was signed by the Air Force Chief of Staff, it is
difficult to envision how hundreds of base-level personnel, of which there was
(and is) a constant turnover, could have done otherwise. That is, it is not at all
clear how they would have known where to send only the “good” reports
without the existence of an additional regulation, and any such additional
regulation would have very soon become public knowledge.
Although the U.S. Air Force no longer maintains a special UFO
investigative unit like Project Blue Book, it continues to investigate specific
UFO incidents, if and when warranted by national defense or security reasons,
as part of its normal intelligence functions.
—ETEP STAFF
Project Magnet This project was a study of UFOs carried out by the
Department of Transport (DOT) in Canada in the early 1950s. It was set up in
December 1950 under the direction of Wilbert B. Smith, then senior radio
engineer, Broadcast and Measurements Section.
The project was quite small; it used facilities of DOT, with assistance from
other government departments, including the Defense Research Board (DRB)
and the National Research Council (NRC). The project was an outgrowth of
work already being done by Smith and a group of colleagues within DOT on
the collapse of the Earth’s magnetic field as a source of energy. It was the belief
of many that “flying saucers” were operating on magnetic principles and it was
thought the DOT work might explain their operation.
The program consisted of two parts: (I) collection of high-quality data,
analysis, and drawing conclusions; and (2) a systematic questioning of all our
basic concepts in hope of identifying a discrepancy which might be the key to a
new technology. Smith also developed ideas for measuring the reliability of
observational data, and using these measurements to rate the probability that a
given report could be accepted as a real observation.
It is noteworthy that in September 1950, Smith interviewed Dr. Robert I.
Sarbacher who was then Director of Research for National Scientific
Laboratories Inc., in Washington, D.C. and had held numerous other top-rank
industrial positions and worked on contract as a “dollar-a-year-man” on UFO
research. He was also Dean of the Graduate School of the Georgia Institute of
Technology. Smith was told by Sarbacher, through LCDR Bremner, on staff of
the Canadian Embassy in Washington who acted as intermediary, that the facts
reported in Frank Scully’s book (Behind the Flying Saucers, 1950) “are
substantially correct,” that flying saucers exist and that the subject of flying
saucers “is classified two points higher even than the H-bomb. In fact, it is the
most highly classified subject in the U.S. Government at the present time,”
according to this record. Smith went on: “May I ask the reason for the
classification?” Sarbacher replied: “You may ask, but I can’t tell you.” The
notes recording this interview were first discovered in one of Smith’s personal
files given to this writer by Smith’s widow; then another copy was found in a
formerly-classified file held by the Canadian government. In 1983, as reported
in the MUFON Symposium Proceedings for 1986, Sarbacher confirmed the
above statements to Mr. William Steinman. It was only three months after
Sarbacher’s statements to Smith that Project Magnet received official Canadian
government authorization.
In 1952, Smith submitted an interim report, in which he stated that it
appeared evident that flying saucers are emissaries from some other civilization
and actually do operate on magnetic principles.
In 1953, he submitted a further report in which he concluded that we are
faced with a substantial probability of the real existence of extraterrestrial
vehicles and that such vehicles must of necessity use a technology considerably
in advance of our own.
Smith established the world’s first “flying saucer sighting station” at Shirley
bay, outside Ottawa, in November 1953. This station consisted of a small
wooden DRB building, containing some highly sophisticated instrumentation
specially adapted to detect flying saucers. These instruments were: a gamma-
ray counter, a magnetometer, a radio receiver, and a recording gravimeter.
These four instruments produced traces on a multiple-pen graphical recorder
which was checked periodically to note any disturbances.
At 3:01 P.M., August 8, 1954, the station registered a definite disturbance,
quite different from disturbances registered by passing aircraft. Smith and his
colleagues were alerted by a built-in alarm system. Regrettably, heavy fog
prevailed and it was impossible to see anything overhead. The recorded
evidence, however, indicated that something strange had flown within feet of
the station.
On August 10, 1954, DOT officially folded Project Magnet, but permitted
Smith to continue using its facilities on his own time at no expense to the
government. Smith continued his work privately until his death in December
1962.
—ARTHUR BRAY
projection/warning theory of UFOs and ETs This could also be called the
“they-are-us” theory: not as time travelers back from the future, but rather “us
in the here and now” mentally projecting our hopes and fears in a conflicted
world. Though I cannot speak for Martin Kottmeyer, in my opinion his theory
of UFOs as an evolving system of paranoia (see PARANOIA AND UFOS) is closely
related to my version of the projection/warning theory. Kottmeyer demonstrates
the extremes the UFO myth can take in the minds of paranoids who accentuate
what I consider “normal” concerns of anyone who realizes what is happening to
our society—namely, dehumanization and loss of individuality on a massive
scale. Ultimately, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Brave New
World Revisited (1958), and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) may prove to be
understatements.
When you consider the content of the UFO-alien myth (or reality), we are
faced with two possibilities: either (1) we are being invaded by aliens who are
behaving much the same (good and bad) as human beings, or (2) we are
metaphorically projecting personal situations and social trends. In other words
we are seeing in UFO-alien lore a metaphorical representation of our own
evolution in all its aspects.
I personally believe this phenomenon functions as an instinctive warning
system orchestrated by the unconscious mind. In this view, the main purpose of
projections is to draw attention to our unconscious perceptions and enhance
awareness of our natural instincts. As with other features of human evolution,
the unconscious warning system has obvious survival value.
The essence of the projection/warning theory was contained in Carl Jung’s
1958 book, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
Therein Jung offered the suggestion that UFOs and ETs constitute a living
mythology that is signaling a coming new age. In this writer’s view, the main
purpose of a living myth is to provide a coping mechanism for the human
condition. Like dreams (hence the surrealism of UFO-abduction accounts),
myths are almost pure metaphor: analogies that reflect our life situations,
collectively and individually.
Dreams = private myths and myths = public dreams, as Joseph Campbell
would say. The images making up these dramas are symbolic and therefore
require psychological interpretation in order to be “decoded,” so to speak, into
literal terms. To one who understands their language, myths and dreams
provide insights into the human condition. And the same holds true for the
entire body of UFO-alien lore.
If we interpret the UFO myth symbolically, it tells us everything that is
happening in our world as understood by the unconscious mind. And more
importantly, when the archetypal themes and events are interpreted as
predictions, we can explore what is likely to happen in the future if the present
course is maintained. Our modern UFO-alien mythology is a projection in
every sense.
Just about everything found in UFO lore is really happening—in one sense
or another—but in my view our imagined “aliens” are not from another planet;
they are “mutant” forms of what we used to regard as human beings. In the
words of the protagonist, Dr. Miles Binnell, in Jack Finney’s 1955 novel,
Invasion of the Body Snatchers: “Sometimes I think we’re refining all
humanity out of our lives.” Yes—we are being invaded by “non-human” (alien)
life-forms who are taking over the Earth: the Grays (emotionless clones), robots
(see the book Robopaths by Lewis Yablonsky); reptilians (like the serpent in
the Garden of Eden), and alien captors using anal probes (a clear analogy here)
who invade our privacy, make us feel paralyzed and powerless—taking away
our human dignity and our freedom by taking our thoughts. These are all
symbolic representations of how we unconsciously see the non-humans who
are taking over and undermining our human society. That is the reason for the
cry to be more “spiritual” vs. material; more caring vs. cut-throat; and having a
conscience vs. being a sociopath. Yes, the human population on this planet is in
deep trouble, and that’s why so many want to be beamed up!
Combine these archetypes with the motifs found in science fiction—which
were also created to depict the same kinds of conditions—and you have the
magic formula for the living myth of UFOs and invaders from outer space. As a
side note, when I met Gene Roddenberry on a New York TV show, in 1981, he
told me that Star Trek was primarily intended as a “social commentary” and not
as science fiction per se.
The reason we have a neurotic society is that we’ve been double-crossed.
We have a major psychological conflict going on. Our parents, society,
organized religion (sold to us as “God”), and our government were all thought
to be the unquestioned guardians of our welfare. And now we know—
unconsciously and consciously—that they cannot be trusted. We’ve been
betrayed, which I think is the major reason for the paranoia that Martin
Kottmeyer writes about.
Psychologist Rollo May thought conflict between what we trusted to be the
case and mixed messages were the leading cause of anxiety disorders. He gave
an example of a case in which parents were openly mean to their child, but at
least were consistent, which did not result in an anxiety disorder. But another
example that involved mixed messages, or inconsistencies, did. (May, 1977)
When we begin to recognize discrepancies in what we were taught in
childhood, a psychological conflict develops. That is why we need new myths
to take the place of old-time religion. This became science with all its promises
for a wonderful utopian future for all, administered by our supposedly
benevolent government leaders.
Now we see science and technology used for all kinds of hidden agendas for
the benefit of certain people (especially forthcoming in the field of genetic
engineering and pharmaceutical research—as in Brave New World. So now
we’ve been double-crossed once again. More conflict; more neuroses. It will be
remembered that a number of famous and intelligent optimists (like Jules
Verne, H. G. Wells, C.G. Jung, et al.) became pessimistic about the fate of man
shortly before they died.
The neurotic response is a cry for myth: a myth we can believe that will
reconcile the disparate elements that do not otherwise make sense.
Most of us cannot look into the mirror or out upon the world and see what is
truly there. We deny the hypocrisy, because we don’t want to believe it is really
happening. So, as Freud and Jung tried to inform us, the projections are
launched as defense mechanisms. But, I think projections should also be
regarded as warnings (in the form of metaphors or analogies) of possible
dangers lurking ahead. The first unconscious model for the “aliens” in modern
times was the “Red Threat” (or the “Commies”) of the Cold War era. But today,
the aliens are our own people (our leaders and ourselves).
Regarding UFOs: Jung seemed puzzled by the fact that “something is seen,
but one doesn’t know what.” That’s where the misidentifications come in.
Especially since World War II, we’ve had all kinds of secret technology (mostly
aircraft) which accounts for quite a lot. Then, of course, there is a myriad of
other things seen that can play tricks on our perceptions, especially since we are
always projecting order onto the unknown.
I would also say there is a high probability that other phenomena exist,
presently unknown to science, and that might even include extraterrestrial
visitors. So, all the more reason to study every aspect of the UFO phenomenon,
but especially the psycho-social aspects, because, with Jung, I think “…we
need more psychology. We need more understanding of human nature, because
the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we
are pitifully unaware of it.” (BBC interview, 1957) But as Bertrand Russell
once said: “Men fear truth more than anything else in the world.” That is our
predicament.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Bacon, Francis. “The Four Idols” (first published in 1620). Reprinted in Readings in Philosophy, edited by
John Herman Randall, Jr., et al. (Barnes & Noble, 1967).
Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales,
and Myths (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951).
———. The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (Harper & Row, 1968).
———. On Being Human (Continuum, 1997).
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Harper & Row, 1932, 1946).
———. Brave New World Revisited (Harper & Row, 1958).
German language edition published in 1958.
C. G. Jung Speaking, edited by William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 1977).
Lorenz, Conrad. The Waning of Humaneness (Little, Brown & Co., 1983; 1987).
May, Rollo. The Meaning of Anxiety (W. W. Norton, 1977).
———. The Cry for Myth (W. W. Norton, 1991).
Orwell, George. 1984 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949; Signet/NAL, 1961).
Sagan, Carl. Foreword to The Space-Gods Revealed by Ronald Story (Harper & Row, 1976).
Story, Ronald D. “UFOs and the Meaning of Life,” (The Quest, Winter 1997).
Yablonsky, Lewis. Robopaths (Penguin Books, 1972).
psychiatric aspects of UFO encounters One intriguing aspect of the
UFO/ET problem concerns people who have claimed contact or abduction by
UFO-entities.
At times, these experiences involve multiple witnesses and include other
corroborative data, such as associated animal reactions. The human biological
or psycho-physiological responses to close encounters have included alleged
illnesses, injuries, burns, temporary paralysis, relief or healing of a condition or
illness, blackouts, seizures, time lapses, change in memory (either increased or
blanked out), changes in intelligence (either vast improvement or impairment),
and various behavioral effects such as fugues and psychosis.
Also, there are many published cases involving psychic (or psi) phenomena,
including instances of (1) purported telepathic and clairvoyant
communications; (2) possible precognition or prophecy; (3) alleged forces
making the craft and/or entities invisible—possibly akin to supposed
materialization, dematerialization, or apportation; (4) accounts of mysterious
appearances and disappearances of UFO-associated creatures (sometimes
“monsters”), with little or no evidence for their existence beyond that which is
witnessed by one person or several persons; (5) claimed telekinesis (“mind over
matter”)—objects moving, strange rappings, sounds, or effects on radio, TV,
lights, telephones, computers, or other electrical appliances; (6) possible
psychic or though-tographic photographs of UFOS; (7) alleged UFO-associated
paranormal audiotapes; (8) alleged teleportations of people or objects; (9)
levitation and “antigravity effects”; and (10) supposed pre- and post-UFO-
sighting paranoia events, such as hauntings, poltergeists, etc.
Much of the UFO “physical” phenomena could be equated with the data of
psychotronics and could be explained as an extension of “psi” (or psychic
phenomena).
An overlooked feature might be the contactee-abductee interactions with
computers. In these instances, two factors that should be considered are: (1) the
mechanism(s) by which the presumed effects take place, and (2) the
interpretation of such data and how these might be possibly (and often
intimately and presently) tie in with the experient’s personal life, precipitating
factors, and so forth. Where does the information come from? How do they
receive the information? What does the information mean?
As UFO experiences and related phenomena are more carefully and
critically studied, these become more understandable and plausible; and
paradoxically, more complex, inscrutable, frustrating, and ambiguous. The
separation of the experience itself from contributory psychodynamics—and in
recent years often gross contamination from the media and popular literature—
poses problems.
Another category of data that the psychiatrist might find interesting is that
which comprises the aftermath of a UFO experience. These data include such
events as strange phone calls and peculiar messages, mail tampering,
frightening visitors of unusual appearance—so-called “Men in Black,” who
often arrive in black Cadillacs—and instances of extreme bad luck.
Follow-up study of these experiences, as well as interviews in some of the
renowned contactee-abductee cases of years ago, might yield significant
additional information about what happened to these people long ago, how they
fared subsequently with their health, what are the apparent wax-and-wane
patterns of various claimed associated psychic phenomena, and what their
current views would be in comparison with what they stated at the time of their
original UFO contact.
It should be stressed that, in contrast to the scarcity of hard-core “nuts and
bolts” UFO data, there is a wealth of biological, psychodynamic, and psychic
data which has been widely published in the Flying Saucer Review, MUFON
UFO Journal, and elsewhere.
It is unfortunate that the psychic aspects of the problem have received little
professional attention compared with the copious material on the astronomical
and physical effects. Of the medical specialties, psychiatry is well equipped to
study those persons who claim contact or abduction by a UFO. The psychiatrist
is proficient in various clinical, laboratory, and experimental techniques,
including obtaining detailed histories of the alleged contactees and abductees
and their families; data on their past health; physical examinations; and, when
indicated, additional studies such as hypnosis and electroencephalography; and
when indicated, videographically monitored electroencephalographic activation
techniques for possible temporal lobe focal discharges; and utilizing newer
discoveries from neuroscience.
The psychiatrist can also collate the various findings of colleagues in other
fields: for example, the ophthalmologist’s evaluation of alleged UFO-induced
eye injury; the dermatologist’s or radiologist’s findings in purported cases of
radiation burns and various skin effects; and arranging consultation with
specialists in positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI). Also, how interesting it would be to have
genetic/DNA profiles of different gifted, documented UFO experients
(contactees, abductees, paragnosts) and their families.
It is often helpful to make field trips to study these persons and their families
in their home environments, and to listen carefully to their stories no matter
how strange. With such background knowledge and discreet use of suggestion,
clinical experiments can be performed that might engender UFO or UFO-like
phenomena, or yield clues to the possible human “here and now” of some, if
not much, of the material and thereby provide a possible understanding of the
psychic core of much of the UFO-ET contact experience.
It appears that what the contactees and abductees claim often constitutes
“subjective” reality, and their ideational content and behavioral reactions do not
conform to the usual mental illnesses that a psychiatrist sees in his everyday
practice.
The UFO experience, whatever its explanation, is seldom, if ever, solely the
product of mental disease; however, the reverse can happen: namely, the
closeencounter UFO experience can precipitate various emotional reactions,
such as anxiety, depression, dissociation, etc.
The contactee or abductee can also become emotionally disturbed over the
open ridicule or disbelief of family, friends, or society in general. This
destructive attitude can be more damaging than an out-and-out credulity.
These people might benefit by seeing the psychiatrist or mental health
professional. Also mention should be made of a useful clinical technique,
“collaborative research,” as developed and pioneered by the late Adelaide M.
Johnson, M.D., Ph.D., of the Mayo Clinic. In this prohibitively costly research
and psychotherapeutic method, highly skilled teams of psychiatrists studied
individual patients and their families with various conditions: e.g., diverse
forms of delinquency, sexual deviations, sociopathic behavior and so forth.
Then, with the permission of the participants, information was reported and
collated in meetings where the data could be pieced together, so that it was
often possible to pinpoint precise causes, contributory factors, and expressions
of these specific forms of deviant behavior and mental aberrations. Much of the
mystery then dissolves.
Possibly an expanded series of psychiatric studies of contactees and
abductees would help answer the question of whether their experiences were:
(1) solely the product of the UFO; (2) a psychopathologically colored,
culturally conditioned reaction to the psychodynamically and psychically
projected UFO; or (3) a combination of these.
Furthermore, it would be helpful to know if the clinical impression is correct
as to: (1) Are many contactees and abductees great natural psychics who by
largely unconscious factors within themselves, and in conjunction with other
persons, induce the UFO experience? (2) Does the terror and uniqueness of the
UFO-encounter experience split them and leave them open to a great awareness
of their otherwise latent psychic abilities? (3) Or, finally, does the force
associated with the UFO encounter directly instill the seemingly enhanced
psychic faculties that engender the phenomena or permit the contactee to tap
another dimension? (4) Could the UFO force be identical with psi? And if not,
(5) what is their interface?
Interestingly, most contactees are excellent hypnotic subjects, and this might
also be a clue to the causation of the phenomena; i.e., they seem to be
exquisitely sensitive to all kinds of subliminal and psychic stimuli. Therefore,
could the UFO force or X factor from another dimension take advantage of this
hypersuggestible state?
Whatever the answers to these speculations, the key to the human part of the
UFO equation might be related to the mechanism and role of the contactee’s or
abductee’s dissociation and relationship to other trancelike and
psychopathological states, multiple personality disorder, gifted paragnosia, idiot
savants, and genius.
The complexity of the UFO phenomenon—considered from both human and
extraterrestrial standpoints—raises momentous questions. Naturally, it would
be desirable to know as much as possible about such a powerful force that can
influence matter, alter our mental states, affect our health and behavior; and
even thought it cannot be measured, this force can inspire, frighten, cause
terror, lead to fanaticism, invention, creativity, and discovery.
Perhaps what could be learned might be turned to constructive use, or
perhaps the various manifestations and the social complications of the UFO
experience suggest that, if what is known were more widely disseminated, it
could have a disintegrative effect on society. If man’s basic mental mechanisms
(e.g., denial, dissociation, projection, and so forth) fail to protect him, there
could be individual and collective epidemics of chaos.
—BERTHOLD E. SCHWARZ
Psychosocial aspects of UFOs A psychosocial approach to the UFO

phenomenon is one which asks: Are ostensible UFO events the physical
happenings they seem to be? Or, do they originate in the psychology of the
individual and take their shape from social factors ?
There is no single psychosocial hypothesis to which all who adopt such an
approach subscribe; there are probably as many variants as there are people
proposing such an approach. What they have in common is a belief that a
typical UFO-related event should not necessarily be taken to be what the
experiencer claims (or believes) it to be, particularly when—as is the case with
most, if not all such experiences—there are no independent witnesses and no
convincing supporting evidence. Rather, it may well be a fantasy created
subconsciously by the wit ness: a fantasy shaped and conditioned by their
prevailing cultural milieu.
For example, in the case of someone who claims to have been abducted by
extraterrestrial aliens, a psychosocial view might be that he/she is
subconsciously projecting his/her subjective preoccupations as an imagined
objective event. The abduction scenario is chosen because it enables one to
externalize their state not only outside oneself but outside humankind, and
because extraterrestrial intervention has become the “authorized myth” of our
time, which has generally replaced the demons, deities, and magicians who
fulfilled the role in former times.
The source material used to construct the fantasy may be of many kinds.
Apart from the general climate generated by mankind’s first ventures into
space, the influence of science-fiction books and movies has been demonstrated
by such commentators as Bertrand Méheust, Martin Kottmeyer, and Nigel
Watson: virtually every feature of the post-1947 flying saucer phenomenon can
be matched with parallels in the American science-fiction pulps of the 1920s
and 1930s.
Alvin Lawson has suggested birth trauma: the abduction experience
resembles the birth experience in several ways apart from the resemblance of
the widely perceived “Gray” aliens to the human fetus. Hilary Evans has shown
parallels with other types of entity experiences: religious visions, ghosts,
spirits, and demons. Dennis Stillings looks to Jungian archetypes as a
conditioning force. Jung himself perceived as early as 1958 that “flying
saucers” were archetypal visions that represented “a modern myth of things
seen in the skies,” though he could not foresee how rich and complex that myth
was to become in the years that followed his death in 1961.
In a typical psychosocial scenario, the subconscious mind confabulates such
materials into a personal story in much the same way that our dreaming mind
draws together elements from all kinds of sources to create our dreams. The
result is a narrative that can often be coherent and plausible, rich in appropriate
detail, convincing many that the event was physically real and took place as
claimed.
Few proponents of the psychosocial approach believe that the experiences
are “all in the mind”: often the experience will be triggered by a physical event.
This event may be genuinely mysterious: more frequently, though, as has been
demonstrated by Randles, Hendry, and Monnerie among others, a banal event,
such as an airplane with landing lights, an advertising airship, or the moon, can
lead to an extravagant fantasy.
The most sustained expression of the psychosocial approach has come from
the small but highly influential British journal Magonia, which even in its
earlier incarnation as the Merseyside UFO Bulletin cast a cold eye on face-
value explanations and found them wanting. Currently edited by John Rimmer,
whose The Evidence for Alien Abductions (1984) is an intelligent appraisal of
the extraterrestrial and psychosocial alternatives, its staff and contributors have
consistently invited readers to consider the psychosocial alternative to the
extraterrestrial hypothesis.
In the U.S., Dennis Stillings’ seminal 1989 collective Cyberbiological
Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience provided a
forum for those who felt there was no need to look beyond Earth for an
explanation of the phenomenon.
European UFOlogists have also published some excellent material
representing the psychosocial: Thierry Pinvidic’s massive 1993 collective
OVNI, subtitled “Towards the Anthropology of a Contemporary Myth,” brought
together many psychosocially-inclined viewpoints. In Australia, Mark Moravec
has made valuable contributions related to the interplay of psychological and
cultural factors, such as the destabilizing effect of immigration.
Few of those who favor the psychosocial approach regard it as the answer to
every puzzle that has arisen in the UFO context. It is evidently not an
explanation for those events which are better explained as secret man-made
devices or for purely understood natural phenomena. But it is probably fair to
say that its proponents see it as the preferred explanation in all cases where
others look to an extraterrestrial explanation.
This viewpoint received strong experimental support when California
professor Alvin Lawson, with his colleague McCall, conducted the “imaginary
abductee” experiment that demonstrated the ability of ordinary people to
fabricate complex experiences. Though virulently attacked by dissenting
UFOlogists, this experiment simply demonstrated, in a UFO-abduction context,
processes well enough known to psychologists.
Another important dimension drawn from psychology has been the
suggestion that UFO witnesses and abductees are “fantasy prone” personalities.
Though Bartholomew and Basterfield were unsuccessful in their attempts to
show that abductees conformed to the classic fantasy-proneness mold, their
thesis received convincing support from the research of Kenneth Ring who
established that UFO witnesses show a psychological profile that is not entirely
typical, leading him to postulate that there is a class of people who are
“encounter prone.” The inference is that UFO incidents and abductions are
more likely to be experienced by some people than by others, which in turn
suggests a psychological origin for the experience.
The weakness of the psychosocial approach is that it relates to human
behavior, an area of study in which it is difficult to obtain consensus views. The
behavioral sciences still remain largely uncharted, and their findings are often
controversial. Consequently, the debate largely consists of speculation and a
balancing of probabilities.
Some of the evidence points either way: for example, the fact that currently
fashionable themes such as ecology and resource abuse recurs frequently in
claimed messages from aliens could be because the aliens really are concerned
with such matters, or because witnesses are projecting their own
preoccupations into an external framework. The fact that one abduction case
will resemble another in close detail has been seen by some, such as folklorist
Thomas Eddie Bullard, as evidence that they are physically real; but it is
equally possible that the similarity derives from unconscious imitation, or even
from the fact that all witnesses are drawing on the same pool of archetypal
imagery.
Particularly significant are those cases where it has been demonstrated that
the claimed event did not physically take place. Some abductees, notably
Maureen Puddy in Australia, have been seen not to be abducted when they
claimed to be so. However, such cases are rare, for the abduction witness is
generally isolated and unobserved, and while it is all-but-impossible for them to
prove that their experience is real, it is equally difficult for the critic to prove it
is not. So, although the psychosocial approach can occasionally be proved valid
in individual cases, there may be no way to establish its overall validity.
In the end, it comes down to a question of probability. Each of us must make
up our own mind which is more likely: that humankind is under threat from
abducting aliens, as investigators such as David Jacobs suggest, or that a
collective mythmaking process is at work, fuelled by psychological and social
factors.
—HILARY EVANS
Q
Quarouble (France) encounter One of the best-known sightings of UFO

occupants in France took place near Valenciennes on the night of September
10, 1954. It was such a strange incident that it received international press
notice.
Marius Dewilde, thirty-four years old at the time, was a metalworker in the
Blanc-Misseron steel mills on the Belgian frontier. He lived with his family in a
small home in the midst of fields and woods about a mile from Quarouble. His
garden was adjacent to the National Coal Mines railway track running from
Blanc-Misseron to St. Armand-les Eaux, and grade crossing 79 was next to his
house.
On the night in question, Dewilde was reading after his wife and children
had retired. It was 10:30 P.M. when he heard his dog Kiki barking, and thinking
there was a prowler in the vicinity of his property, he took a flashlight and went
outside.
Dewilde walked to his garden, found nothing en route, then spotted a dark
mass on the railroad tracks less than 6 yards from his door. He thought at first
that someone had left a farm cart there. At that point his dog approached,
crawling on her belly and whining, and simultaneously he heard hurried
footsteps to the right of him. The dog began barking again and Dewilde
directed his flashlight toward the sound of the footsteps.
What Dewilde saw startled him greatly. Less than 3 or 4 yards away, beyond
the fence, were two creatures, walking in single file toward the dark mass at the
tracks. Both creatures were dressed in suits similar to those of divers, and light
was reflected off glass or metal in the area of their heads. Both entities were
small, less than 3 ½ feet tall, but had very wide shoulders. The legs looked very
short in proportion to the height of the little “men,” and Dewilde could not
make out any arms.
After the first fright passed, Dewilde rushed to the gate, intending to cut
them off from the path or to grapple with one of them. When he was about 6
feet from them, he was blinded by a very powerful light somewhat like a
magnesium flare which came from a square opening in the dark mass on the
tracks. He closed his eyes and tried to scream but couldn’t, and he felt
paralyzed. He tried to move but his legs would not function.
Shortly, Dewilde heard the sound of steps at this garden gate, and the two
creatures seemed to be going toward the railroad. The beam of light finally
went out and he recovered the use of this legs and headed for the track. But the
dark object had begun to rise, hovering lightly, and Dewilde saw a kind of door
closing. A low whistling sound accompanied a thick dark steam which issued
from the bottom of the object. The object ascended vertically to about 100 feet
altitude, turned east, and when it was some distance away it took on a reddish
glow. A minute later it was completely out of sight.
After he regained his senses, Dewilde woke his wife and a neighbor, told
them of this experience, then ran to the police station in the village of Onnaing,
a mile distant. He was so upset and his speech so confused that the police
thought he was a lunatic and dismissed him. From there he went to the office of
the police commissioner where he told his story to Commissioner Gouchet.
Dewilde’s fear was so evident that Gouchet realized something
extraordinary must have taken place, and the next morning his report brought
investigators from the Air Police and the Department of Territorial Security.
These teams, along with police investigators, questioned Dewilde and then
examined the area where the dark object had rested. They found no footprints
in the area, but the ground was very hard. However, they did find five places on
three of the wooden ties which had identical impressions, each about 1 ½
inches square. The marks were fresh and sharply cut, indicating that the
wooden ties had been subjected to very great pressure at those five points.
The impressions were never satisfactorily explained, but railroad engineers
who were consulted by the investigators, calculated that the amount of pressure
required to make the marks was approximately thirty tons.
An examination of the gravel of the roadbed showed that at the site of the
alleged landing the stones were brittle as if calcined at very high temperature.
Lastly, several residents in the area reported that they had seen a reddish
object or glow moving tin the sky at about the time Dewilde indicated that the
object had left.
References
Lorenzen, Coral and Jim. Flying Saucer Occupants (Signet/NAL, 1967).
———. Encounters with UFO Occupants (Berkley Medallion Books, 1976).
R
Randle, Kevin D. (b. 1949). Born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Kevin Randle

received his undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa and has done
graduate work at the University of Iowa, California Coast University, and the
American Military University. He has earned a Masters Degree and Doctorate
in psychology and a Master of Military Science.
Kevin Randle
Randle is a former U.S. Army Helicopter pilot who served in Vietnam, and a
former Air Force intelligence officer who rose to the rank of captain. He was at
one time a field investigator for APRO, and a special investigator of the J.
Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.
He has published more than fifty magazine articles, and more than a dozen
books about UFOs. His 1991 book, UFO Crash at Roswell was made into the
Showtime original film, “Roswell.” His work on alien abductions, along with
that of Russell Estes and Dr. William P. Cone, has suggested important new
information on the topic. In addition, Randle has written more than eighty
novels including several science fiction books. (His pseudonyms include: Eric
Helm, Cat Brannigan, James Butler Bonham, and B.R. Strong.)
P.O. Box 264

Address: Marion, IA 52302
U.S.A.
E-mail: krandle993@aol.com
POSITION STATEMENT: I believe that we have been visited by extraterrestrial

creatures. I base that conclusion on my research into the Roswell UFO crash, my
interviews with the men and women involved on that case, and the limited
documentation available.
That said, I must add that I believe that the visitations have been extremely
rare. Most of the information circling in the UFO field today has little factual
base. Many of the subsets of UFOlogy, crop circles, cattle mutilations, MJ-12,
the Allende Letters, and half a dozen other areas, have little or no legitimate
basis. They are made of hoaxes, lies, misidentifications, fabrications, and
anonymous and useless documents. By eliminating these, we begin to see the
real picture.
One subset of the UFO field, alien abductions, is extremely dangerous.
Although I don’t believe that alien abduction is real, I do believe that those
claiming abduction are sincere people who truly believe what they say. The
answer to the problem does not lie with alien spacecraft, but with the
researchers, therapists, and investigators, as well as human psychology. We can
answer all the questions without the need of alien intervention.
The bottom line is that I accept little of what has been said in the UFO field.
Although I now believe that we have been visited, that does not require me to
accept all of the ancillary areas of UFO research. Once we reduce the noise, we
will find the answers.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
Randles, Jenny (b. 1951). Jenny Randles joined the British UFO Research
Association (BUFORA) in 1969 and became a council member in 1975. She
served as Director of Investigations (l981-1994) and created the democratic,
one person one vote, National Investigations Committee as a team of loosely
integrated UFO investigators. During her tenure she was a driving force behind
the implementation of a “Code of Practice” to govern ethical behaviour for
UFOlogists (l982). There was also a BUFORA ban, still in force, on the use of
regression hypnosis (l988) and she wrote and then administrated a six-month
postal training course for new investigators (l990). From l989 to date Jenny has
continued to write and record BUFORA’s “UFO Call”—a weekly news and
information service available to all telephone subscribers in the U.K.
Jenny Randles
Randles worked closely with the British Flying Saucer Review, serving
behind the scenes under editor Charles Bowen. Since leaving FSR she has
worked closely as British representative for the J Allen Hynek Center for UFO
Studies (CUFOS) and contributes regularly to the International UFO Reporter
as British consultant. Since l974 she has edited the magazine Northern UFO
News —making her one of the world’s longest running editors to still publish
the same UFO journal. Jenny has been a member of the paranormal research
group NARO (Northern Anomalies Research Organization), formerly known as
MUFORA, and also worked closely with ASSAP, the Society for Psychical
Research and Fortean Times. For over 20 years she has handled UFO cases
referred to her by the world famous astronomy and science centre at Jodrell
Bank.
In l978 Jenny became a professional researcher, funding her own work
through writing. She has since published articles in many prestigious sources,
including The London Times and New Scientist. Her 42 books have covered a
wide range of paranormal topics but 26 have been about UFOs. Editions have
appeared in 26 countries and over one million copies have been sold. Library
lending figures regularly place Jenny amongst the most loaned authors in the
U.K.
Randles trained as a science teacher and has a diploma in audio-visual/media
communications. For some years she served as the ITV network “Paranormal
Agony Aunt” answering viewers questions. She has written and presented a
series of radio comedy items about the paranormal and serious radio
documentaries about UFOs for the BBC. In l996 she co-produced, scripted and
presented her own documentary—“Britain’s Secret UFO Files”—for BBC
Television. This venture achieved a record audience rating for the department
and was the third most watched show on the whole channel that week.
Between l993 and l998 Jenny was officially contracted as “Story
Consultant” by the hit ITV series “Strange But True?” Her extensive
involvement from the pilot onwards included the writing of two spin off books
and work on a 90-minute live special on the night of UFOs 50th anniversary in
l997. “Strange But True?” set a record audience figure in 1994 when almost
one quarter of the entire U.K. population (12.5 million people) watched its
celebrated episode on the Rendlesham Forest case. In l999 she was consultant
to the six-part Granada TV series “Origin Unknown”—devoted exclusively to
UFO cases.
1 Hallsteads Close
Dove Holes, Buxton
Address:
Derbyshire
England SK17 8BS
E-Mail: nufon@currantbun.com
POSITION STATEMENT: There is no “UFO phenomenon.” But there are

multiple UFO phenomena that require a range of different explanations.
From my experience in the field I have no doubt that 95 percent of sightings
can be explained as the result of known scientific causes (such as bolides,
weather effects and other IFOs). Many of the remainder are what I prefer to
term UAP—Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena —and result from energy
sources created by atmospheric physics, geology and meteorology. Some of
these will, in my opinion, extend the boundaries of known science and are
“new” phenomena in that sense. Indeed researchers in fields such as ball
lightning lose key evidence because they ignore UFOs. In fact more extreme
forms of ball lightning are often reported not to science, but to UFOlogy in the
mistaken guise of alien craft.
I also suspect that there are other rare and more “exotic” types of UAP,
involving plasma energy and vortices that can perhaps cause temporary rifts in
the fabric of space. We do a disservice to ourselves by neglecting to study them
or by our ill-judged presumption that the word UFO is synonymous with alien
spacecraft. Some of these energies can be harnessed for the benefit of mankind
—as may have been grasped by a few scientists in government employ. The
cover-up, such as it is, operates not to hide fantastic secrets such as crashed
spaceships, but to obscure ignorance of the truth. I fear that the powers that be
may well be using UFOlogists as unsuspecting pawns in a social disinformation
exercise to make the subject appear absurd to mainstream science. This allows
research to continue covertly where such energies are more likely to be used for
offensive purposes. A UFO cold war is thus afoot with UFOlogists puppets in
it.
As for alien contact/abductions, the vast majority of witnesses are sincere,
telling things as they perceive them to have occurred. They are not
psychologically unstable. However, it seems beyond question that these close
encounters are fundamentally different from UAP. They are experiences, not
sightings, and occur when the witness is in altered state of consciousness, as
marked by the Oz Factor. Those who are prone to undergoing such experiences
have abilities that are different from most other people. This includes high
levels of visual creativity and an unusual level of recall of early life. Such
people are either able to have a visual experience that is so vividly real and
appears to them to be reality, or can communicate with some other level of
reality not normally accessible to the rest of us.
These experiences have more in common with near-death and out-of-body
visions than with UFO or UAP. In my opinion the concept of aliens coming to
Earth in starships to perform medical examinations is unsuccessful—as is the
skeptical dismissal of cases as mere illusion. Instead the truth reveals a great
deal about the nature of consciousness and of reality itself. But until we realise
that we are looking in quite the wrong direction for the answer to the close
encounter mystery, we will appear to make little progress. In fact we have
actually made huge strides towards that truth—not least by clarifying what is
not taking place. Far too few UFOlogists, let alone members of the public, have
come to realise this sobering news, because the media have dismally failed to
grasp the true complexity of the field. There is a huge social and financial
incentive to maintain the illusion of alien invaders.
—JENNY RANDLES
reconnaissance theory of UFOs Once the existence of UFOs is accepted,

their purpose must be addressed. The most pervasive thinking tends to gravitate
toward the ideas of secret, stealthy, or covert observation. (Haines, 1987) Is
Another World Watching? (Heard, 1951), Why Are They Watching Us?
(Erskine, 1967), Are We Being Watched? (Bord, 1980) are just a few of the
titles which exemplify this theme.
UFOlogists have preferred the terms “reconnaissance” or “surveillance” to
describe these operations. Some, like Donald Keyhoe, were more precise and
called it “spying.” Spies evoke connotations of furtiveness, moral ambiguity,
and psychological complexities that the other terms skirt. This essay traces how
the aliens-are-watching-us anxiety came to occupy such a central place in
UFOlogical thought.
The flying saucer era opened in an atmosphere of deep intrigue. Kenneth
Arnold saw nine objects brush by Mount Rainier at speeds far beyond that of
anything then being tested by the U.S. Air Force. Arnold believed they were
unconventional craft being tested by the government. The public was
fascinated. The Pentagon was, however, confused. It wasn’t anything of ours,
they were fairly sure. Was it something of the Soviets? They got a lot of
German scientists from World War II and we knew the Nazis had a lot of wild
ideas. But why fly it here? It set a lot of heads scratching in the intelligence
community. The FBI was asked to do background checks on saucer reporters to
see if they had Communist leanings.
The linking of flying saucers to extraterrestrials happened very quickly.
Within four days of his sighting, Arnold said some woman rushed into a room,
took one look at him, then dashed out shrieking: “There’s the man who saw
men from Mars!” (Gross, 1976) Hal Boyle, an Associated Press columnist,
spoofed going on a trip in a flying saucer with a green Martian named “Balmy.”
(Strentz, 1982) Dewitt Miller spoke of the objects being not just possibly from
outer space, but from other dimensions of time and space. (Gross, 1976) On
July 8th, the Army issued a statement expressing assurances that the devices
were neither bacteriological devices of some foreign power or secret Army
rockets, and they were not from outer space. (Gross, 1976)
On July 10th, Senator Taylor expressed the wish that saucers would turn out
to be from outer space to unify Earth. (Gross, 1976) This idea was apparently
common coin for it had been satirized already two years earlier in a favorite
Fritz Leiber story “Wanted – An Enemy.” The plot consisted of an Earthling
trying to convince peace-loving Martians to make a token invasion and looting
of the Earth. He explains wistfully that mankind needs an enemy to unify him.
The discussion convinces the aliens that they should reconnoiter the Earth and
verify that our psychology was as the visitor claims. If true, they would
exterminate us. Why take chances? (Leiber, 1974)
Kenneth Arnold
Amid these extraterrestrial speculations can be found an early expression of

the idea that aliens are watching us. Loren Gross found a little news article
dated July 8, 1947, bearing the headline “Eyes from Mars.” In it R. L.
Farnsworth, a Fortean and the president of the U.S. Rocket Society, noted that
spots in the sky were nothing new and opined, “I wouldn’t even be surprised if
the flying saucers were remote-control eyes from Mars.” (Gross, 1976)
Despite talk of Martians in the air, few took the idea seriously. Of 853 cases
collected by Ted Bloecher for his Report on the Wave of 1947, only two
witnesses openly expressed the opinion that the objects they saw were space
ships. Kjell Qvale was the first and dates to July 5th. (Bloecher, 1967)
The other one was by John H. Jannsen and is of a rather special nature. To
begin with, he is one of the few witnesses who took a photograph of the
saucers. He states: “I really believe these craft to be operated by an intelligence
far beyond that developed by we earth-bound mortals and am inclined to agree
with the theory they are spacecraft from outer space.” He theorizes about
magnetic and antigravity propulsion methods, then continues: “In all
probability these are reconnaissance craft and as they have been seen all over
the world and not only in this country, are probably making a thorough study of
us and our terrain and atmosphere before making any overtures.”
Donald Keyhoe
It is all reminiscent of Keyhoe, but undeniably precedes him by two years.

Several weeks after this sighting, Jannsen has another encounter. His plane is
stopped in midair for a number of minutes while being scrutinized by a pair of
disks hovering nearby. Since this makes Jannsen a repeater, Bloecher counsels
suspicion. The case is, however, an instructive microcosm of reconnaissance
beliefs generating reconnaissance experiences in a period when practically no
one had such expectations. (Bloecher, 1967)
A Gallup poll in August of 1947 indicated that 29 percent of the public
thought the saucers were optical illusions or products of the imagination. Ten
percent thought they were hoaxes. A fair percentage, 15 percent, agreed with
Arnold that the saucers were a U.S. secret weapon. Only 1 percent thought they
were Russian secret weapons. If anyone volunteered the opinion that the
saucers were extraterrestrial, the pollsters did not bother to tally them.
The intelligence community continued to ponder the mystery in the months
following the 1947 wave and was less inclined to dismiss it as imagination. A
letter between General N. F. Twining and Brigadier General George Schulgen
demonstrates belief by the intelligence community that the phenomenon was
real and either a domestic high-security project or a foreign nation had
developed a new form of propulsion, possibly nuclear. (Gillmor, 1969)
Sometime during this period a school of thought grew which held that the
phenomenon was probably interplanetary. A Top Secret “Estimate of the
Situation” by some of these people allegedly exists that recommended the
military be put on an alert footing. The Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt
Vandenberg, however, vetoed any such drastic official action. (Gross, 1982)
An Air Intelligence Report dated December 10, 1948, concluded that the
flying objects were probably Soviet in origin, and pondered the reasons for the
flights: (1) negating U.S. confidence that A-bombs were the ultimate defense;
(2) photographic reconnaissance; (3) testing US defenses in advance of a one-
way all-out attack by strategic bombers; (4) familiarizing their pilots with our
topography. The report expressed doubts about each of these ideas.
With regard to the reconnaissance notion, the report pointed out that
sightings rarely involved areas we considered strategic. Maybe it was an effort
to fill in gaps that were left from intelligence the Soviets gathered in liaisons
with American industry in World War II. Some sites like Oak Ridge, Las
Cruces, and the Hanford atomic works (which had sightings) would not have
been accessible to them. (Andrus, 1985)
Almost simultaneously, in a report for Project Sign dated December 13,
1948, James E. Lipp offered the first thoughtful analysis of the notion that
extraterrestrials were involved. From the text it is evident that various people
had begun taking the possibility seriously. One section of the report dealt
specifically with the reconnaissance concept.
Here it was suggested that perhaps the Martians, having kept a long-term
routine watch on Earth, became alarmed at the sight of our A-bomb blasts as
evidence that we were warlike and on the threshold of space travel. (Venus is
eliminated here because her cloudy atmosphere would make such a survey
impractical.)
The first flying objects were sighted in the Spring of 1947, after a total of
five atomic bomb explosions i.e., Alamagordo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,
Crossroads A, and Crossroads B. Of these, the first two were in positions to be
seen from Mars, but the third was at the edge of the Earth’s disk in daylight,
and the last two were on the wrong side of Earth to be seen. Some thought it
was likely that Martian astronomers, with their thin atmosphere, could build
telescopes big enough to see A-bomb explosions on Earth, even though we
were 165 and 153 million miles away, respectively, on the Alamagordo and
Hiroshima dates.
Lipp didn’t foresee the possibility that the watch could be turned over to
computers and photoelectric sensors and other monitoring devices like remote
satellites which would leave Martians free to consider more exciting pastimes
and still be alerted to special developments when they happened.
Elsewhere in the report for Project Sign, G. E. Valley did a little
brainstorming of the various possibilities. He astutely said of the Soviet secret
weapon theory: “It is doubtful a potential enemy would arouse our attention in
so idle a fashion.” He toyed with the idea of space animals explaining saucer
behavior. He junked notions about ships propelled by rays or magnetic fields on
straightforward physical considerations, but held out the possibility of an
antigravity shield. The notions that seemed to be left were mass psychology or
extraterrestrial visits prompted by A-bomb development. (Steiger, 1976)
The public knew little more than the fact that saucer sightings kept popping
up from time to time. The Mantell case in January, 1948, seemed to remove the
possibility it was all some kind of joke. While the Air Force seemed to be
taking some of the sightings seriously, it still downplayed the materiality of the
phenomena as well as the Soviet or outer space notions about their origin.
The editor of True magazine thought their behavior was “damned queer” and
called in Donald Keyhoe to snoop around aviation circles to see if he could turn
up anything. (Gross, 1983) Keyhoe thought the Air Force’s treatment of the
Mantell case looked like a coverup. He was also unimpressed by their handling
of the Gorman and Chiles-Whitted cases. A former intelligence officer provided
Keyhoe with a scenario in which saucers were remote-control “observer units
with television eyes sent from an orbiting space base.” This would be a prudent
preliminary step to determine if we were a “fiercely barbarous race” before
exploring the world in “person.”
These contentions formed the basis of Keyhoe’s infamous article for True
magazine “The Flying Saucers are Real”. His main conclusions were that:
1. For the past 175 years, the planet Earth has been under systematic close-
range observation by living, intelligent observers from another planet.
2. The intensity of this observation, and the frequency of the visits to the
Earth’s atmosphere by which it is being conducted have increased markedly
during the past two years.
3. The vehicles used for this observation and for interplanetary transport by
the explorers have been identified and categorized as follows: Type I, a small
nonpilot-carrying disk-shaped aircraft equipped with some form of television or
impulse transmitter; Type II, a very large (up to 250 feet in diameter) metallic
disk-shaped aircraft operating on the helicopter principle; Type III, a dirigible-
shaped, wingless aircraft which, in the Earth’s atmosphere, operated in
conformance with the Prandtl theory of lift.
4. The discernible pattern of observation and exploration shown by the so-
called “flying disks” varies in no important particular way from well-developed
American plans for the exploration of space expected to come to fruition within
the next 50 years. There is reason to believe, however, that some other race of
thinking beings is a matter of two and a quarter centuries ahead of us.
The True article was one of the most widely discussed magazine articles of
its time. Prominent newsmen like Walter Winchell and Frank Edwards
discussed it. The article was expanded into a book bearing the same title later
that same year. (Keyhoe, 1950)
In May 1950, the Gallup poll showed that the American public was leaning
toward Arnold’s view. Twenty-three percent now believed saucers were an
American secret weapon. Those who believed they were illusions or hoaxes
had dropped to 16 percent of the sample. The Russian secret weapon idea now
garnered 3 percent of the public. The pollsters had to add a new category called
“comets, shooting stars, something from another planet” and placed 5 percent
of the public into it. (Gallup, 1972)
Documents released by the intelligence community were of such a
contradictory nature that Keyhoe sensed a coverup. Never mind that the
contradictions could be explained more simply by the fact that they had not
come to any consensus. Keyhoe claimed many scientists had come to believe
the saucers contained “spies from another planet.” Even Nazi scientists
believed space observers (according to Keyhoe) were watching us, and their
conviction had led to their experimentation with circular aerofoils. (Keyhoe,
1950)
Keyhoe bolstered the reconnaissance theory by pointing to what he
perceived as a pattern of focused interests. In the 19th century, interest was on
the most advanced part of the globe—Europe. It shifted to America in the late
19th century as industry and cities sprang up. Then came surveys of both
continents as aircraft were developed. Observation increased in response to the
V-2s during World War II.
Still more increases followed our A-bomb explosions and a second spurt
followed Soviet A-bomb testing. Recent interest had focused on our Air Force
bases and atomic testing areas. Encounters like the Gorman incident were
viewed as a test of our aircraft capabilities. Keyhoe concluded that observation
had become intermittent and that the long-range survey would continue
indefinitely. Their plans concerning us were incomplete so no contact seemed
evident. (Keyhoe, 1950)
Three years later, Keyhoe came out with a sequel, Flying Saucers from
Outer Space (1953). He articulates in greater detail the clustering of saucer
sightings over various locales. These are: (1) atomic energy plants at Oak
Ridge, Hanford, but most frequently over Los Alamos; (2) Air Force bases; (3)
Naval bases; (4) the high-altitude rocket base at White Sands; (5) aircraft
plants; (6) major cities. The repetitive nature of some of the saucer visits led to
the speculation: “it looks like they’re getting ready for an attack.” The
dominant theme, however, remained that this was a new phase of “surveillance
by some planet race” prompted by radio and television signals. Keyhoe
unmodestly quoted a friend as saying: “But one thing’s absolutely certain.
We’re being watched by beings from outer space.” (Keyhoe, 1953)
The Robertson Panel looked at the same clusterings and was not so sure.
Yes, they saw the cluster around Los Alamos. Maybe it had to do with the
overalertness of security at such a secret installation. In counterpoint, it was
noted that similarly sensitive atomic energy establishments showed no saucer
clusters. They also noted that many of the sightings were over areas with no
strategic worth whatsoever. They concluded that the evidence of any direct
threat from these sightings was wholly lacking. Concern that these sightings
might clog emergency channels with false information or be used by the enemy
for purposes of psychological warfare led to the recommendation that a
program of education be set up “to reduce the current gullibility of the public.”
Aimé Michel would also speculate that Keyhoe’s clusters resulted from the
atmosphere and hyperalertness present at secret atomic and military facilities.
People end up fearful of many things in such establishments. (Michel, 1967 )
Keyhoe’s thesis in these early books was impressionistic and airy
speculation. He cites no evidence of downed saucers with TV cameras. He cites
no alien informants explaining their missions. We don’t even see talk of glints
of sunlight off telescopic lenses. John Janssen was the only person during the
1947 wave who had the impression the saucers were scrutinizing him.
Retrospectively, Loren Gross points to five other cases in 1947 of UFOs
making circling motions that he felt could be indicative of spying, but such
behavior is also consistent with birds getting navigational bearings or travelling
on thermals. (Gross, 1983)
There really wasn’t any evidence to build on. Some of the cases even argue
against it. Keyhoe expresses the opinion: “The Mantell case alone proves we’ve
been observed from space ships,” yet the object was nonsensically huge from a
reconnaissance perspective. Why utilize a thousand-foot craft if they possess
speedy, maneuverable devices only 6 to 8 inches wide as supposedly proved by
the Gorman case? (Keyhoe, 1950)
Whatever their faults in retrospect, Keyhoe’s writings were seminal in
directing the future course of the UFO mythos. Keyhoe was read by many, and
heard in the media by many more. UFOlogists adopted his thesis sometimes
explicitly, often implicitly.
Albert Bender in the first issue of his fannish publication Space Review
(1952) spoke of the Earth being “under observation of some greater power in
space”. (Bender, 1962) Harold T. Wilkins wondered aloud if the saucermen had
terrestrial spies and spoke of small observation discs sending information to
half-mile wide “brain ships”. (Wilkins, 1967) Morris K. Jessup referred to some
UFOs as “small, agile observers” which are sent out to exploratory missions
from larger vessels dwelling in the “earth-sun-moon gravitational neutral.”
(Jessup, 1955) Aimé Michel, despite his doubts over Keyhoe’s clusters,
nevertheless believed that aliens had been watching us for some time. (Michel,
1967)
Gavin Gibbons followed Keyhoe, adding more detail. In The Coming of the
Space Ships (1958) he reported on a pattern of sightings in his vicinity in
England which led him to believe there was little doubt saucers represented a
“reconnaissance preparatory to a landing in force.” He offers a fourfold
typology of saucers in place of Keyhoe’s threefold typology. His consists of: I)
vast metallic discs; II) cigar-shaped craft; III) scout craft; and IV) unmanned
scanners, small spheres, remote-controlled, nonmetallic and maybe liquid or
vaporous.
One notable feature of this forgotten book is its bringing into play a report
that genuinely supports the aliens-are-watching-us concept. A person named
Roestenberg witnessed strange men who gazed down at him and his family
from a saucer tilted at an angle for detailed viewing. (Gibbons, 1958)
The Lorenzens of APRO added new intensity to the reconnaissance concept
as the UFO mythos entered the sixties. They asserted that the saucers adhere to
a pattern indicating the Earth is the subject of a geographical, ecological, and
biological survey accompanied by military reconnaissance of the whole world’s
terrestrial defenses. This pattern, they further claimed, could not be mimicked
by psychic projections on the part of thousands of people. They theorized that
the saucers represented a flotilla of reconnaissance ships concerned about
protecting intelligent beings who as recently as 1877 had migrated to Mars on
what are now known as its moons Phobos and Deimos. Comparatively small in
number, they would be preoccupied with our future scientific and military
developments. Since this pattern showed a progression not only from
reconnaissance to surveying, but from surveying to hostility, the Lorenzens
believed the saucer problems embodied “an urgency that defies expression.”
(Lorenzen, 1966)
Frank Edwards, basing his work on the work of Keyhoe and NICAP, also
advanced the idea that the UFO phenomenon was progressing through a series
of phases. The foo fighters of World War II, for example, now represented the
second phase of the alien plan and represented close-range surveil lance by
instrumented probes. The seventh phase was to be the “Overt Landing” and
was due, by his reckoning, in 1968 or 1969. (Edwards, 1966)
Frank Edwards
James E. McDonald, another major figure of the sixties, expressed a belief

in patterns indicating “something in the nature of surveillance lies at the heart
of the UFO problem.” (Sagan and Page, eds., 1972)
The popular books of Brad Steiger suggested the existence of a “steady
pervasive program of invasion or antagonistic observation.” (Steiger, 1967)
Brinsley le Poer Trench also believed the Earth has been under constant
surveillance for a very long time. Rank-and-file UFOlogist Robert Loftin also
concurred that UFOs engaged in surveillance. (Loftin, 1968)
Far and away the best argument for the surveillance concept was made by
Otto Binder in his 1967 magnum opus What We Really Know About Flying
Saucers. In the finest empirical tradition, he cited a series of reports which at
least do show aliens engaged in activities suggesting a program of observation.
Saucers are shown maneuvering around objects in an inquisitive manner; aliens
are shown taking samples of soil, vegetation and animals; aliens are shown to
be watching people; and saucers are shown bearing searchlights. With this array
of evidence, he concluded with a measure of logical force that a Project Earth
Reconnaissance exists, which could mean either future conquest or peaceful
scientific exploration. Against the idea of future conquest, Binder noted that 20
years had by then already passed with no concerted hostile move; and so he
predicted that no secret takeover was in the offing. (Binder, 1967)
Brad Steiger
In a sequel titled Flying Saucers Are Watching Us, Binder backdates the
saucer phenomenon into deep history. The human body’s many mysteries speak
to our world being a vast biological laboratory and breeding ground. “A vast,
never-ending worldwide game of observing humans under all kinds of
conditions and situations” seemed apparent. (Binder, 1968)
Sensible as Binder’s argument is, it is compromised by the fact that
Keyhoe’s argument had altered people’s expectations. By 1968, 40 percent of
the public believed people had seen space ships that did not come from this
planet—a far cry from 1950 when pollsters did not even give the idea a
category to itself. (Gillmor, 1969)
The belief was generating experiences that proved it. This is evident in the
Interrupted Journey, when Betty Hill read one of Keyhoe’s books, the Flying
Saucer Conspiracy, and soon after had a nightmare involving aliens examining
her out of neutral curiosity. (Fuller, 1966) While Keyhoe could not accept it
100 percent, he would include an account of the Hill case in a later book as
possible evidence of extraterrestrial visitation. (Keyhoe, 1973 and Steinberg,
1989)
Brinsley le Poer Trench
Validation of the concept could be seemingly straightforward, such as when

saucers hovered alongside ships or a saucer followed a train “as if inspecting”
the crew, or when saucers shadowed people. But it could take on peculiar
aspects as in a case reported in Hynek’s The UFO Experience (1972). A 3-foot
luminous spheroid “appeared to be examining a tree rather closely” for several
minutes. It moved deliberately and purposefully in its inspection of the tree,
pausing slightly at apparent points of interest and giving the distinct impression
of “intelligent” behavior. Intelligent it does sound like, albeit no greater than
that of a hummingbird and seemingly less meaningful. Granted, there is no a
priori reason why aliens can’t love trees as much as humans, yet it still seems a
problematic point of surveillance interest. (Hynek, 1972)
As UFOlogy entered the seventies, doubts about the reconnaissance concept
began to grow, even among advocates of the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH).
James McCampbell surveyed cases in Jacques Vallée’s catalogue of Type I
UFO events for evidence of reconnaissance and came away puzzled. He saw
supportive evidence in aliens gathering flowers, plants, grass, animals, water
samples, soil samples, stones, and boulders. There was also an alien observing
abandoned oil derricks and a contact where an alien revealed their
philanthropic and scientific motives.
He felt, however, that a thorough study of the Earth would require an
enormous range of activities, and these cases weren’t even coming close. He
concluded: “The idea that the UFO people are conducting any kind of
organized and thorough scientific study on Earth is not sustained by the
available information. Instead their activities on the ground are strangely
haphazard and disorganized….Instead of conducting a comprehensive survey
of Earth, the UFO people appear to be snooping around for some natural
commodity on Earth, either vegetable or mineral.” (McCampbell, 1973)
In his final book, in 1973, Keyhoe still defended the reconnaissance thesis,
but had to concede it was a “strange surveillance.” A group of Keyhoe’s
assistants which included anthropologists, educators, psychologists, and
communication experts almost unanimously concurred that aliens could not get
a true picture of our world by distant observation. The implications were
serious. Aliens would be seriously misled by the protocol evident in their study
of us. Instead of rejecting the ETH, Keyhoe decided we urgently needed to
force contact with the aliens to rectify their procedural error. This prompted
Keyhoe’s advocacy of Operation Lure, a fantastic cargo cult scheme to draw
UFOs down to Earth. (Keyhoe, 1973)
Long-time critic of UFOlogy Peter Kor took Keyhoe’s book to task as an
anachronism. While Keyhoe’s theory may have had a certain plausibility in
1950, the operation had since become inconceivably long. The showdown
predicted by so many people inspired by Keyhoe’s concept had never come.
(Kor, 1974)
Frank Salisbury echoed that he had problems believing reconnaissance
would be extended as long as UFO history suggests. Even granting aliens might
survey a planet in a way we would not, Salisbury had a tough time believing
aliens would do the things UFOs were reported to do. (Salisbury, 1974)
Skeptic Ian Ridpath reiterated that the purpose of all the scrutiny implied by
the volume of reports was unclear. He expressed the surprisingly Fortean
skepticism that belief in the reconnaissance theory is built on the basic
assumption/fallacy that we are important enough for other people to be deeply
interested in us. (Ridpath, 1978)
Leonard Stringfield maintained that we know incontrovertibly that UFOs
exist, but agreed it was “disturbing to not know its source, its nature, and the
purpose of keeping Earth under constant surveillance.” He cited among many
cases an incident which suggested a UFO intended either to spy on a missile
base or take some type of provocative or offensive action (Stringfield, 1976)
B. Ann Slate also mentioned that the alien surveillance of key military and
research installations, and defense maneuvers was continuing, based on
witnesses she had interviewed. (Slate, 1977) Kolman S. VonKeviczky was
unabashedly maintaining in 1976 that authorities “must after all seriously
assume that the galactic powers operation clearly indicates a centrally
conducted ‘interstellar reconnaissance’ with the ultimate objective of a landing
operation on earthly soil.” (Hervey, 1976)
Yurko Bondarchuck, in 1979, was surprisingly excited over an intensifying
pattern indicative of increased earth occupant surveillance. He can even be seen
exclaiming: “UFOs are engaged in data gathering activities!” He felt their
behavior suggested a preoccupation with monitoring Earth’s natural habitat, our
technological development and our physiological-behavioral make-up.
(Bondarchuk, 1979)
Raymond Fowler considered among many ideas the notion that the
aloofness of aliens might be a strategy of advanced reconnaissance parties
awaiting the main force of a classical invasion. (Fowler, 1974)
The eighties have seen both reticence and devotion to Keyhoe’s concept.
The most significant modern devotee to the Keyhoe tradition has been Budd
Hopkins. For Hopkins, patterns in the abductions indicate that aliens are
conducting a long-term, in-depth study of humans, using implants to monitor
us. (Hopkins, 1981)
Hilary Evans, in the Evidence for UFOs, allowed the possibility that
structured artifacts of extraterrestrial origin were engaged in some kind of
surveillance operation, but, if so, it was being conducted in a “remarkably
sporadic and unworkmanlike manner.” (Evans, 1983) The authors of Clear
Intent were likewise tentative and felt the purpose of UFOs was unknown but
“may be related to an extended surveillance of what may be termed a primitive,
embryonic society.” (Fawcett and Greenwood, 1984) Whitley Strieber took a
mystical tone and asserted that the visitors’ activities go far beyond a mere
study of mankind. (Strieber, 1987)
In 1987, Timothy Good felt “surveillance has intensified” since we have
endangered our planet and expanded into space. The modern wave began with
the development of nuclear weapons and rockets. Activity around nuclear
missile sites demonstrated their continuing interest. He also felt Earth held
spectacular attractions for tourists. (Good, 1987) This last sentiment is an
interesting conceit relative to a fifties notion that Earth was a prison. (Keyhoe,
1960) A tract on abductions by Dr. Edith Fiore has flatly affirmed: “ETs are
monitoring and watching people throughout the world.” (Fiore, 1989)
The latest exercise in the Keyhoe tradition was some speculation advanced
by Richard Hall about UFO patterns. According to Hall, extraterrestrial
intelligences (ETIs) have been watching our technological progress, especially
our propulsion capabilities, our actions in warfare, our nuclear technology, and
our reaching out into space. His private studies convinced him that interest has
focused on atomic energy facilities and petroleum-related activities. Hall makes
explicit the corollary Ridpath felt UFOlogists were obliged to make: the
persistence of ETIs implies a strong interest in us. (Hall, 1988)
Aimé Michel went further, earlier in the decade, and acclaimed that humans
must be something rare and “cosmically precious.” (Story, ed. 1980)
There are no signs that the aliens-are-watching-us idea is going to disappear
from the UFO mythos. Despite blows to its credibility in the seventies, it
continues to garner adherents. From the standpoint of historical development, it
seems that the idea arose less from scientific evidence than from the habit of
the intelligence community to regard deception and furtiveness as the natural
order of things. No one seems to have questioned whether the aliens would be
ideologically and behaviorally diverse. Rather, the most natural state of affairs
is presumed to be a universe filled with spies—to the exclusion of curious
extraterrestrials imbued with a spirit of open inquiry and mutual exchange.
As Keyhoe was told, a program of scientific inquiry cannot be done from a
distance. Face-to-face interaction and participation in affairs of life are the
proper ways to conduct anthropological investigation. If covertness is essential
to avoid infusion of alien concepts, reconnaissance could be done by
bioengineered mimics of humans, dogs, cats, insects or dust mites. Instead of
glowing UFOs, an advanced culture would engineer mimics of conventional
objects like planes, choppers, balloons, clouds, or the moon. They wouldn’t
invite questions by presenting an identifiable alien construct. (Lem, 1936)
The reconnaissance idea never pulled together into a coherent framework
more than a minor fraction of Type I cases. As McCampbell found out, no more
than 2 percent of the cases implicate the existence of alien investigators. A
crashed or captured reconnaissance disk has never been tendered for display at
MIT or the Smithsonian. Predictions based on the concept have consistently
been proven wrong.
Given the persistence of the idea and the irrational nature of the arguments
that supported it, the question arises: could it be that UFOlogists are telling
people something they need to believe?
PARANOID ETS
It is instructive to see how the ideas of UFOlogists were mirrored by the

aliens themselves. One of the fist people alleging inside information about
aliens was a medium named Mark Probert who was in the service of the
Borderland Sciences Research Foundation (BSRF). The group learned through
persons on the “other side of life,” having access to the etheric worlds, that the
saucers were appearing in order to demonstrate the possibility that there are
ways to travel faster and eliminate friction. The sensation was all meant to
compel our attention and wake us up.
There is actually something to be said in favor of that view. It was much
easier to believe that flying objects passing by Mount Rainier were meant to be
seen, rather than secret hardware being tested by the government as Arnold
believed.
In 1948 Probert got the word that we were being observed, so that a final
record of our civilization could be made for future history. This was reiterated
in a 1950 communication which said notes were being taken on our
advancement—before our fall.
In 1952 there is an apparent intrusion of Keyhoe’s ideas into messages
received by the BSRF group. There is talk of reconnaissance craft and small
remote-control craft used to make visual observations without drawing
attention to themselves. Note the inversion—they no longer want to wake us
up. (Layne, 1972)
Employing a glass tumbler on a Ouija board, George Hunt Williamson
eliminated one of the middlemen in extraterrestrial communications. On
August 2, 1952, he made direct contact with a being from Mars named “Nah-
9.” The Martian revealed that our world had been observed for 75,000 years.
Williamson and his circle eventually contacted dozens of aliens, among
them the first known paranoid extraterrestrial. “Affa” of Uranus expressed fear
of the work going on at Lowell University: “The big eyes were looking at us,”
he complained. (Williamson, 1963)
Three months later, an acquaintance of Williamson would do him one better
and meet a human being from another world fact-to-face. The name of that
acquaintance was George Adamski. In the initial encounter, Adamski
communicated with the alien by signs and gestures, and telepathy. Among the
things he learned was that the little disks which were often reported served as
eyes for the larger motherships. If the disks were in trouble, a crosscurrent
would detonate them in order to prevent capture. (Leslie and Adamski, 1953)
This innovation could have been gleaned from Keyhoe’s writings.
Though Keyhoe personally rejected the rumors, he reported in The Flying
Saucers Are Real that some individuals believed the disks would disintegrate
with an explosive charge if they ever got out of control. (Keyhoe, 1960) The
idea began with Dr. Lincoln La Paz, who thought the green fireballs were made
of beryllium copper, so they would burn up with no debris. Spectra indicated,
however, that the green fireballs contained magnesium, and so were probably
of natural origin.
In a later encounter, the aliens took Adamski on a tour of their ship. Inside,
he was shown a central magnetic pillar that doubled as both a propulsion unit
and a powerful telescope, which allowed them to inspect the land below. He is
shown a TV set on which is registered everything seen by remote-control disks
ranging in size from 10 inches to 12 feet in diameter. These disks registered
every vibration taking place in the area under observation. They even allow
aliens to know what we are thinking. Adamski saw over a dozen of these
registering disks. (Adamski, 1955)
Howard Menger, in time, saw one of these registering disks explode. The
aliens shortly thereafter affirmed to Menger that it had been out of control. He
elaborated on the fact that these disks recorded all emotions, thoughts, and
possible intents. (Menger, 1959)
The Mitchell sisters added a novel wrinkle to this portrait. An alien named
“Alna” demonstrated for them a spy scope that could see through roofs by
subtracting their vibrations from other vibrations of a building. (Mitchell, 1973)
Orfeo Angelucci’s aliens spoke of our planet having been under observation
for centuries, but only recently it had been resurveyed. Every point of progress
in our society is registered. (Angelucci, 1955)
Dan Martin corroborated the spy paradigm in titling the account of his
contact The Watcher. Decades later, another alien named “Khyla” would also
be known as “The Watcher.” (Valerian, 1988) Contacts with names like
“Asmiz,” “Quamquat,” and “Mister Zno” likewise affirmed that we were being
watched. The seventies contactee Claude Vorlihon (a.k.a. “Rael”) was told by
his alien mentors that they had come to see what we were up to, and to watch
over them. (Vorlihon, 1978)
Abductee literature also lends support to the picture of aliens spying on
humanity. Herb Shirmer, from his 1967 encounter, received testimony that his
aliens were engaged in surveillance. (Smith, 1976) Like Adamski, Schirmer
was shown a baby saucer inside the ship that could be launched to check out an
area and send pictures to a vision screen in the mothership.
In the 1975 abduction of Charles L. Moody, aliens refer to the craft they are
on as an observation craft. It was distinctly smaller than the main craft and was
said to be vulnerable to interference by radar. (Lorenzen, 1978)
Raymond Shearer, an abductee of 1978, broke out in a cold sweat fearful he
had become a possible agent or spy for the aliens. (Smith, 1979)
During a May 1979 encounter, William Herrmann, while aboard a saucer,
witnessed rendezvous with what the aliens termed an “observance vehicle.”
(Stevens, 1989)
Virginia Horton’s aliens included one wanting to be a bioanthropologist.
They collected a blood sample for later examination and research. The aliens’
research had led to us being considered a “precious species.” (Hopkins, 1981)
One could regard all this face-to-face testimony as corroboration of the
validity of Keyhoe’s thesis. The pedigrees of these experiencers, however, are
of mixed value. Mediums and Ouija boards are suspect to say the least.
Adamski is largely dismissed as a charlatan by UFOlogists who want to be
taken seriously. Menger confessed his experiences more or less were not real.
The other contactees also tend to be rejected as promulgators of fantasy.
Abductees come late to the game and long after Keyhoe’s ideas had suffused
the UFO mythos.
If these are fantasies, why do all of these people have their aliens say, in
essence, “I spy”? The first possibility is camouflage. The contactees try to
blend their fantasies with contemporary beliefs to give them credibility. An
allied possibility is that they sense this is something people want to believe and,
following an ancient credo, “Tell them what they want to hear.” The other basic
possibility is that contactees want to believe it themselves.
UFOlogists, until the advent of the abductees, never used the testimony of
UFO contacts to buttress the reconnaissance thesis. But both groups affirm it
explicitly and implicitly. It is harder to discount the need to believe as fuel for
the advancement of the idea in the case of the contactees. Untainted rationality
can hardly account for the motif’s presence there. If need accounts for one, it
many unconsciously account for both groups believing aliens are watching us.
Yet why would anyone want to believe anything like that?
The sensation of being watched is a common psychological experience. It
can be termed an archetypal phenomenon, for it is founded on a universal
feature of human life. All of us are watched when we are children. Parents must
constantly keep an eye on us to keep us out of danger or prevent us from
causing trouble. As the child grows up he learns that certain behaviors have
undesirable consequences and will become wary of doing things that might
provoke an unwanted response from his parents. A glance at the parents for a
look of approval or disapproval can cue him whether he’s doing the right or
wrong thing. These parental responses are sought and anticipated. Over time
they are internalized, as a separate agency develops within the mind that
oversees and supervises behavior even when the parent is absent. This agency
has been variously termed the conscience or superego. Poets have called it the
“watchman of the soul.”
The conscience constantly compares our behavior to the ideals instilled in us
by our parents. The ideals are added to by authority figures such as teachers,
religious figures, cops, media pundits, friends, and public opinion as time goes
by. When we fall short of the ideals we set for ourselves, become insecure, or
find ourselves apart or isolated from the rest of society, the conscience makes
itself felt. Sensations imprinted from childhood of being spied upon by
distrusting parents or parents giving “that look” can surface to make us stop
what we’re doing and think over our actions. Though such actions on the part
of our conscience may make us anxious and may even cause us to be wracked
with guild, they develop from the need to feel pride about ourselves and warn
us there are consequences in our misbehaving.
Parenting and socialization are unfortunately not always gracefully
managed. Ambitious parents can instill ideals impossible to live up to in a
child. Cruel parents can assault the child with criticisms and punishments that
are impossible to live down. Parents may teach distrust by unfairly spying on
the child with insufficient cause. Under these circumstances the superego can
take on severe qualities that hang on as fixed aspects of the adult’s character.
When these superego functions are split off and distort an individual’s
perception of reality, the situation can be termed pathological and the condition
acquires the description of paranoia.(Frosch, 1983)
Generally speaking, paranoia is defined by the idea that one is being
persecuted. Among the striking commonalities of this idea is the motif of being
watched by others. Such erroneous beliefs have been categorized by
psychiatrists under the phrase “delusions of observation.” (Eidelberg, 1968) As
Freud saw it, there is ultimately a grain of historical truth behind such
delusions. The individual had been watched before, but as a child. Pride forces
the individual to deny feelings of internal narcissistic mortification, but accepts
external control by imaginary others or others in imaginary relationships. It is a
compromise solution to a moralistic dilemma. Without it, the individual falls
into unbearable depression and self-loathing. Distorting one’s perceptions of
reality exacts costs over time, however. Whether the cost is worth it is a deeply
problematic issue.
Many paranoids function at superior levels of performance in their work and
may bother no one with their quirky ideas. Others may act on their delusions
and make false accusations that destroy human relationships and injure the
innocent. While paranoia can be treated by analysis, it is a difficult and
emotionally painful process for both the individual and the therapist.
Therapists, if nobody else, wonder if it is worth it.
It is fairly natural to assume that the beliefs encountered earlier in this essay
are collective equivalents of the delusions of observation seen in individual
cases of paranoia. We are looking for the eyes of our parents in some sense.
Rather than dwell on our inadequacies, which we know we would find, we
anxiously look skyward for signs of attention and supervision. In the case of the
contactees nothing could be clearer, given the beliefs of aliens being able to
read our thoughts, something parents give every appearance of doing at times.
It is tempting to lay the growth of the UFO mythos to collective shame over
Hiroshima and the development of nuclear weapons in the fifties. Outwardly
we were proud of the Yankee ingenuity we showed in constructing this
superweapon, but the gruesome effects of it were undeniable in the photos
brought back and displayed in Life magazine and elsewhere.
Oppenheimer, in his oft-quoted lecture before MIT in December 1947,
spoke his conscience: “In some crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no
overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin and this is a
knowledge they cannot lose.” One could easily deny the physicists had sinned
and many did. The knowledge, however, returned in projected form—the
delusion of aliens watching us. The concern reflected in Lipp’s researching
whether or not aliens could have seen our nuclear blasts gives some credence to
the notion, as does the frequency of talk about A-bombs by both contactees and
UFOlogists in the fifties.
The possibility of narcissistic mortification over Hiroshima is most relevant
in the context of the cluster of UFO reports around Los Alamos noted by
Keyhoe and the Robertson Panel. Interest in flying saucers appears to have
been considerable there. Ruppelt of Blue Book singles out the Atomic Energy
Commission’s Los Alamos lab as a place where so many people turned up for
his briefings that the lecture theater wouldn’t hold them all.
Whether nuclear shame has a wider role in fueling the UFO mythos is open
to considerable doubt. Why didn’t the paranoiac reaction set in immediately in
1945? UFO flaps don’t correlate well with atomic tests. Blue Book set up a
UFO reporting net in the Eniwetok H-bomb test region, but got nothing for the
effort. Not only has there been a notable absence of bomb-project physicists
among UFOlogists, but two are renowned for their disbelief. Enrico Fermi, the
mastermind of the first chain reaction in 1942, is also known for the famous
Fermi Paradox against the prevalence of ETI civilizations. Edward Condon was
a member of the committee that established the U.S. atomic bomb program and
later served as advisor to later atom-related study groups of the government. A
recent tribute to Hermann Oberth reminds us that while here is a figure who
believed in saucer reconnaissance, his claim to immortality lies not with the
atom, but with the creation of the V2 rocket.
Clearly nuclear shame has limitations as a source for UFO paranoia. This is
more fully rendered inadequate by the larger consideration that paranoid
delusions are a constant element in our culture’s fantasies. Paranoia may have
been rampant in the forties and fifties, but even then it was nothing new.
Collective paranoia existed before there was a Hiroshima.
C.R. Badcock points out that beliefs in shepherding sky-gods begin,
historically, with the formation of nomadic pastoral economies and the
domestication of animals. Before that, man’s beliefs tended to be animistic and
polytheistic because of the nature of cultivation and agriculture. The practices
of pastoralism obliged a special psychology formed of independence, an
obsessional nature, and the feeling of guilt-shame. The formation of such
personalities favors the creation of paranoiac reaction states of mind and the
spread of paranoid beliefs. From the inception of these new practices we start to
see the spread of myths about all-seeing gods and secret races of watchers of
mankind. (Badcock, 1980)
There survives from ancient Babylon, for example, a prayer to the first-
begotten of Marduk who is addressed as “You watch over all men.” (Saggs,
1962) Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, besieged Jerusalem in early Biblical
times and exiled its people. Among them was the prophet Ezekiel. He believed
God had passed judgment that his people were sinful. While in exile he came to
see a vision of wheels in the air with “eyes round about,” and from then on
prophesied doom and destruction. (Ezekiel 1:20)
A rendering of Ezekiel’s vision with eyes everywhere
Also in the Bible we encounter practices like Joshua’s placing seven eyes on
every stone of the Temple to convey the special watchfulness of God. It is
commonly believed that the eyes of the Lord can range through the whole
Earth. (Eichrodt, 1967) As he lay in bed, Daniel had a vision of a watcher that
came down from heaven. (Daniel 4:13) Watchers are also spoken of in 2 Enoch
XVIII as a group of angels banished to a dungeon along with Samael, a
planetary power and prince in heaven. (Patai, 1983)
Christianity, with its end-of-the-world fantasies and fears of eternal
damnation for trivial infractions, has been termed paranoid by some
psychiatrists. (Badcock, 1980) It is an interesting question whether or not the
decay of the Roman empire provided the fuel for its diffusion. Regardless, there
is little dispute it lent a distinctly paranoid tone to the Dark Ages. People lived
in a double-spy cosmology, as angels and devils scrutinized the minute day-to-
day behavior of everybody for the slightest blasphemy or offense. (Keen, 1989)
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, fantasies of flying witches and secret
meetings of Devil worshippers led to the Great Witch Hunt, one of the deadlier
paranoid delusions to have gripped masses of people. (Cohn, 1975)
Mass paranoia does not confine itself to religious realms. Conspiracy
theories constantly interweave with reality-based political thought and often
dominate it. The American Revolution, some historians now argue, was rooted
in a pandemic of persecutory delusions.
Paranoiac fantasies suffuse American history: the Illuminati conspiracy and
anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, “the Gallic peril,” slaveholders’ conspiracies,
baby-killing and dismemberment by Indians, the Yellow peril, reefer madness,
the fluoridation-poisoning fear, the Red Nightmare and McCarthyism in the
fifties, JFK assassination theories, the TriLateralists, the Gemstone file, cattle
mutilations, the Satanist conspiracy, etc. (DeMause, 1982)
Anyone in doubt of the influence and industry of the paranoid is directed to
Murray Levin’s dissection of the Great Red Scare of 1919-20. It led to
lynchings, the crushing of unions, and the abandoning of civil liberties. The
belief in a nonexistent Bolshevik conspiracy to foment a revolution that would
destroy the American way of life was supported by an “irrefutable” 4465-page
document called the Lusk Report. Psychotic ravings are reprinted without
evaluation and bits and pieces of reality are force-fitted to prove what
amounted to a vague assumption. (Levin, 1971)
This writer suspects that our culture has a constant reservoir of paranoids
ready to adopt and give flight to any fear that finds a coterie of advocates. It
isn’t any particular instance of collective shame that accounts for the origin or
diffusion of paranoid beliefs in our culture. Thus the spread of Keyhoe’s
reconnaissance theory probably wasn’t dependent on Hiroshima.
Elements of the UFO mythos are clearly evident long before the forties and
fifties. There was, for example, a significant market for stories about
extraterrestrials visiting Earth or being visited by Earthlings as early as the
1890s. Nearly 60 such “interplanetaries” appeared in that decade. (Locke,
1975)
Among the late comers was H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds in 1898. It may
be a small surprise to the reader that more extraterrestrials were reported during
the airship waves of 1896 and 1897 than during the flying saucer flap of 1947.
(Neeley, 1988)
Most of the 19 reports involve little more than extraterrestrial picnics and
camp-outs or excursions. A pair speak of negotiating trade agreements. One
airship is here to pick up ice. Two involve spirits or angels making surveys for
future colonization. Only one case involves Martians scrutinizing humans for
the apparent purpose of securing an inhabitant. There is also one case of
unearthly beings hurling balls of fire, brimstone, and molten lava from an
airship at witnesses—the only other one fully suggestive of paranoid fear.
Overall, the airship waves look like nine-day wonders unrelated to paranoia-
fueled UFO fantasies of our times.
It is actually easier to trace the development of the UFO mythos to the
British airship scare of 1912-13. These flaps were clearly paranoid in character,
involving the belief that German Zeppelin airships were secretly visiting
Britain for spying out the land in preparation for war. (Watson, 1988) There
seems to be no compelling reason to doubt that these events inspired John N.
Raphael to pen “Up Above: The Story of the Sky Folk” for Pearson’s
Magazine.
The plot begins with a rash of disappearances that include the Prime
Minister, an elm tree pulled up by the roots, an invalid in bed from a collapsing
house, the town pump, a weathercock, a ewe, and a ram. One man survives to
describe being picked up by some force and later dropped. A professor arrives
to investigate and speculates that a race of sky folk may have the same curiosity
about us as we have about creatures at the bottom of the sea.
“Isn’t it plausible that having this curiosity, and having at their disposal
scientific methods, of which for the present, we can know little or nothing, they
should endeavor to discover more about us? How would they try to obtain
information?”
The answer it seems is by using an immense pincher to take up samples, by
winch, to their space ship. Blood subsequently falls from the sky—then, a
decapitated gorilla’s head. Finally, the body of a man, partly skinned, is
discovered with a diary confirming the worst.
The man describes being placed in a transparent cubicle and seeing animals,
humans, quantities of dirt, rocks, and seawater on display as though the ship
were a combination of museum and zoo. He observes dissection experiments
and, realizing his fate, straps his diary to his body in expectation of his remains
being tossed overboard.
The ship subsequently develops power trouble and settles into Trafalgar
Square. The aliens are regrettably killed when rescuers cause air to rush inside
the craft after making a hole in it. The hope is expressed that the aliens won’t
be sending down another expedition. (Moskowitz, 1976)
This was probably the first major story to adopt the premise of furtive
extraterrestrials flying about our atmosphere engaged in abduction for scientific
research. Sam Moscowitz argues it is unlikely Fort could have missed this story
in his extensive reading. Pearson’s was one of the most widely read magazines
in its day and was certainly in the New York Public Library, which was haunted
by Charles Fort. The first corollary, that it played a role in Fort’s ruminations
about extraterrestrial visitors—who found us mysteriously useful and caused
various disappearances and sky falls—follows naturally.
All the elements for the reconnaissance theory of UFOs seem to be present
by 1913: belief in extraterrestrials, belief in furtive airships, the idea of
examination, and paranoia. The only thing that seems to be miss ing is a
Keyhoe and a Mantell case to lend his idea seriousness. Fort was too much the
class clown to phrase his ideas in arguments that tried to convince. It also might
be that the public needed the sensation of Arnold’s supersonic saucers to
redirect their attention to aerial mysteries. Teasing out all the relevant factors
and possibilities may keep historians guessing for years.
Though no single episode of collective shame can be pointed to, as
establishing the UFO mythos, the idea may provide a key to several mass
manifestations of the UFO phenomenon. The major flaps subsequent to 1947
appear in concert with major historical episodes of national shame or
humiliation.
The 1952 wave coincides with an emotionally charged steel strike which
caused allegations of treason: that steelworkers were undermining the war in
Korea.
The 1957 wave emerged in the wake of Russia’s launch of Sputnik and the
realization that Yankee technological superiority had been called into question.
It was easily the pivotal identity crisis of the fifties generation.
The 1965 wave began within days of the first U.S. ground combat
operations in Vietnam. It was quickly termed a “futile assault,” and in the
weeks that followed the situation visibly deteriorated. After the initial pulse of
the wave passed, the famous Watts riots kicked up a secondary peak in mid-
August.
The notorious “swamp-gas” flap of 1966 played against the backdrop of the
first anti-U.S. demonstrations in Hue and Danang, then Saigon and elsewhere.
Spectacular fiery suicides by religious figures were particularly agonizing to
behold. Lastly, the 1973 wave blossomed in the heat of Watergate.
Psycho-social historian Lloyd DeMause has asserted that staring eyes can be
found during times of crisis in every country and every age—from ancient
Egypt’s “Eye of Horus” to the “hypnotic eyes” of Adolf Hitler. Though they
can be attached to foreign enemies, they are often pictured as simply floating
above us—strange, unidentified staring eyes. (DeMause, 1984)
Unidentified Flying Objects with their connotations of aliens-are-watching-
us seem to be a variation of the paranoid delusions of observation prompted by
ego crises seen both with individuals and groups.
EYE IMAGERY
“The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder…” Darwin confessed, as he

tried to explain how the eye arose through the process of natural selection.
(Colp, 1986) But the power of the eye to elicit this sense of the uncanny is itself
a product of evolved instinct. Staring eyes provoke physiological arousal in
many species of animal. The eye-shaped pattern emblazoned on the bodies of
butterflies, birds, snakes, fish, and peacocks evolved because of the instinctive
avoidance the eyes provoke. The predator does not want itself to become prey.
(Grumet, 1983)
Eyes are one of the first things recognized and tracked by infants.
Experiments have shown that masks consisting of two eyes, a smooth forehead,
and a nose will by themselves cause an infant to react with a smile. The
absence of a mouth makes no difference and serves to prove the smile is not
imitative. It is only the area of the eyes that innately provokes the response.
(Campbell, 1959) After six months the response is limited to familiar faces.
Strangers will elicit screams, particularly if they have large eyes (as when
wearing spectacles) or show large teeth.
The power of the eye is constantly alluded to in love poetry through the
ages. Eye make-up highlights and exaggerates the allure of the eye in a manner
that ethologists term “supernormal sign stimulation.”
Exaggeration of the size of the eye is commonplace in art and sculpture. Eye
idols, and idols with eyes twice the normal size, have been found in places
where cultural diffusion is an improbable explanation, such as the Olmec
culture of Mexico and cultures of the Indus and Euphrates. (Jaynes, 1976)
Divine eyes have been regarded as a universal motif in mythology. (Meslin,
1936) Though such images can connote, in their benevolent aspect, the love of
a parent for the child, it can also connote the authority of parent and society.
One finds eye imagery exaggerated in paranoid art, because of the focused
attention on the eyes looking for any faint cues of disapproval. Film buffs will
recall movies of the fifties, the era of the blacklist, as often possessing scenes of
montages of disembodied eyes connoting disapproval of an anxious or harried
outcast from society. Films of the alien invasion genre often possess
exaggerated eye imagery in connection with a varied array of paranoid motifs.
Some aliens are little more than giant eyes, such as in the films It Came from
Outer Space (1953), War of the Worlds (1953), The Crawling Eye (1958), The
Atomic Submarine (1959), the “Moonstone” episode of Outer Limits (1964),
and “The Robot Spy” of Johnny Quest (1964).
Humanoids with oversized eyes are also commonplace in science fiction and
pulp horror illustrations.
The alien invasion genre of films provides an accessible body of paranoid
fantasy with which to demonstrate certain facets of the psycho-dynamics of
paranoia. The facet to be demonstrated here is the relationship between
cataclysmic themes and supernormal eye imagery.
Probably the best place to start is with the movie War of the Worlds (1953).
The world of Mars is dying, so the Martians decide to wipe out mankind and
take over our planet. Their space ships crash into the Earth as fiery meteors.
The first thing to emerge from the crater is a large mechanical eye, which
spectacularly destroys anything in its gaze. Here is the old fear of the Evil Eye
updated with a vengeance.
It later transpires that the Martians themselves aren’t much more than eyes
with spindly arms and legs. The film is an orgy of fire and explosions and
doom. Only the hand of God, the original term for plagues, ends the invasion.
It Came from Outer Space (1953) also opens with a fiery meteor crashing to
earth. A scientist goes into the crater to investigate and confronts a huge
spherical spaceship that resembles a huge eyeball with a hexagonal pupil. A
rockslide starts descending around him at the sight of it, and he flees with no
proof. The rest of the film dabbles in dopplegangers, Men-in-Black, mysterious
phone noises, and other paranoid paraphernalia.
Killers From Space (1954) is an especially fascinating work possessing a
nakedly paranoid structure. It opens with an A-bomb going off and the crash of
a plane researching the effects of the blast. The project official in the plane
stumbles into base after the crash with amnesia and a surgical scar over his
chest. While recuperating, he awakens one evening to see a pair of disembodied
eyes floating towards him. He encounters the eyeballs again on a later occasion,
as he is driving down a highway. He complains that people regard him as a
mental case.
Then he is caught passing along military secrets to an unknown party.
Sodium pentathol is injected into him and out pops a story of his being operated
on by aliens with eyes like painted Ping-Pong balls. They learn the aliens had
removed his heart and repaired the damage he received from the plane crash.
He is shown a screen on which appears the image of the aliens’ home world
and their dying sun. It looks like an eye. The aliens, one billion strong, intend
to invade our world by releasing monster insects and reptiles to wipe us out.
Aware of the threat, now that the amnesia is lifted, the official contrives a
plan that results in the destruction of the alien bases of operations via a
surreally tilted nuclear blast that vindicates his sanity.
Skipping ahead to the more familiar territory of Star Trek, we can point to
the award-winning episode “The Doomsday Machine” as another illustration of
the relationship. Starship Captain William Decker is found catatonic after
losing his crew. He had beamed them down to a planet, but couldn’t rescue
them when an immense automated planet-killer reduced it to rubble. Events
lead him to command the Enterprise and take it into futile battle. As they
approach the machine, the planet-killer looms up with the appearance of a giant
eye.
Decker eventually commits suicide and Kirk destroys the planet-killer by
imploding the engines of Decker’s abandoned ship. Speaking of planet-killers,
the Death Star of Star Wars also presents the appearance of a giant eyeball that
shoots lasers from its pupil.
The reason for this intertwining of cataclysmic imagery and eyes is
psychiatrically elementary. Paranoia is intimately tied to the experience of
shame. It is shame that creates delusions of observation. Same also has the
effect of fragmenting the ego and this is accompanied by fantasies of world
destruction or other images of cataclysm. (Freud, 1953)
Paranoiac reactions, with their enhanced stimulus sensitivities and loss of
discrimination, will stimulate many idiosyncratic concerns, but these two are
archetypal and structural.
UFOlogy, not unexpectedly, provides many examples of this relationship.
Donald Keyhoe, our premier advocate of the belief that we are being watched
by other worlds, also expressed numerous apocalyptic fears in his early books:
super-atomic bombs he feared would throw Earth out of its orbit or propel large
chunks out of the planet with unpredictable results. Aliens might be here to
play audience to a replay of Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950). He also
feared that Russians would stage a mass A-bomb attack in 1954, employing
rumors of saucer attacks to paralyze communication and transportation
networks. (Kottmeyer, 1991)
Most of the early believers in the reconnaissance theory held some form of
fear that catastrophe was impending. Albert Bender believed the polar ice caps
were ready to capsize the Earth in 1953 with an attendant array of natural
disturbances. (Bender, 1953)
Harold T. Wilkins warned that lithium bombs would turn the Earth into a
flaming nova. Morris Jessup feared either a pole-shift, a cosmic storm, or
atomic holocaust would befall the Earth before 1980. Aimé Michel regarded
saucers as a sword of Damocles hanging over us, portending “the greatest
catastrophe in human history” if they should contact us and learn of our inferior
ethics. The Lorenzens felt the saucers embodied an urgency comparable to
Pearl Harbor and speculated Earth faced a crisis of the Velikovskian variety.
(See this writer’s entry on PARANOIA AND UFOS for more examples.)
This relationship breaks down around 1974 as cataclysmic fantasies
decrease in response to the reintegration of the ego taking place around that
time in UFOlogy. It is not surprising that ambivalence about the reality of alien
reconnaissance takes place about then. A complete rejection however is
difficult, since this might be tantamount to denial of the existence of a superego
or conscience and so a threat to the recovering ego.
There are numerous independent criteria pointing to the reintegration taking
place at that time: the appearance of influencing machine fantasies, the decline
in hypochondriacal pleas to diagnose the flying saucer problem as real,
decreased death fears about mass poisoning or galactic experiments in
cremation. The shift in viewing Earth as a fiercely barbarous race and a prison
or asylum to viewing Earth as a tourist attraction, and an anthropologist’s prize,
similarly signals the increase in self-worth attending the ego reintegration of
the paranoid over time. (Kottmeyer, 1989)
UFO experiencers also show evidence of this relationship. One example
concerns the case of the abductee William J. Herrmann. On the 10th of
November, 1981, Herrmann was fired from his position as a children’s church
teacher, because the church believed he had become involved in satanic things
when he spoke on TV about UFOs. On November 14th, Herrmann received by
“automatic transmission” from his alien contacts a diagram of the power unit
which contains images of a pair of eyes. That same day, he wrote an essay titled
“Inevitable Destruction,” in which he warns that geopolitical events may soon
lead to the entire Earth being engulfed in an “eternal firestorm.” That these
things turned up so soon after the humiliation of a public excoriation makes a
clear case that a paranoiac reaction was in process. (Stevens, 1989)
In the Liberty, Kentucky, triple abduction we find our paired motif (the
watchful eye and world destruction), but separated into two individuals. Under
hypnotic regression, Mona Stafford sees a large “eye” ob serving her as she lies
on a table. Humanoids in surgical garb then examine her and she is transported
to a room in a volcano. (Lorenzen, 1977)
She then experiences traveling at the speed of light while glued to a stool.
She later revealed a belief that she had been tested to be a messenger of God’s
warning that man had to better his way. “It’s going to be a terrible time,” as
Revelation predicts. She believed the effort to be as futile as warnings before
Noah’s flood. She was personally convinced her life was going to be destroyed
and she would never see another birthday.
Louise Smith, one of the other abductees, did not experience seeing an eye
during her regression. Instead she relived fluid material covering her that made
her gasp for breath. She thinks they were making a mold of her body. She
subsequently learned the aliens were coming from a dying solar system, but
admits that this made no sense to her since she was unaware that a solar system
could die.
This may have been derived from Earth versus Flying Saucers (1956) whose
aliens hail from a “disintegrating solar system.” Smith’s aliens allegedly could
control rain. The movie’s aliens were able to induce meteorological
convulsions on Earth to warn everyone of their power.
One can also see the pairing of motifs in Whitley Strieber’s Communion
(1987). The eyes of the alien are horrifically blank, black, and inhumanly large.
Subsequent to his nightmare, he felt one evening the sky was alive and
watching him. Strieber had full awareness this was a paranoid fantasy.
(Strieber, 1987) In a hypnotic session he experiences an image of the world
blowing up.
Edith Fiore reports an instance of a friend who felt faint and whose heart
beat wildly upon picking up a copy of Communion. Fiore felt this reaction was
peculiar and was able to elicit memories of a CE-IV (Close Encounter of the
Fourth Kind or abduction) from this individual.
This should not be too surprising, given the large staring eyes on the book’s
jacket. As mentioned earlier, staring eyes stimulate physiological arousal in
many animals besides man. Fiore’s ability to elicit a CE-IV experience from
this individual is deeply suspicious since it proceeded from the false premise
that her friend’s reaction was unusual. But wouldn’t most people find the image
of Strieber’s alien unsettling to some extent?
Barney Hill’s experience lacks a cataclysmic motif, but deserves attention
here because of the issue it raises about eyes and the UFO experience. It is safe
to say that we would never have heard of The Interrupted Journey if Barney
Hill had not reacted so dramatically to the image of the UFO he saw in the
binoculars.
This incident was not an artifact of the hypnotic sessions; it was consciously
experienced and remembered. As he looked at the UFO, he felt the leader was
staring at him. On experiencing this he rips the binoculars from his face, tearing
the straps, and runs screaming back to the car. This is very untypical behavior,
for Barney had served three years in the Army and handled himself well in
crisis situations. He didn’t seem to be the type to panic over something like
being looked at. Getting to the car he threw it into gear and told Betty, his wife,
to look out for the craft. Later, she admitted she thought his imagination was
being overactive—because when she looked up, she saw nothing. (Fuller, 1966)
These facts alone point to the presence of a paranoid reaction, but we also
know that he was in this state before the UFO experience. When they stopped
to eat earlier at the restaurant, Barney complained that everybody in the street
was looking at them. This complaint, “all eyes are on us,” is a delusion of
observation just like the image of the staring leader in the saucer. Barney
himself realized everybody was actually behaving in a pleasant manner and that
he had better get a hold on himself.
What is also interesting about Barney’s account is the drawing of the UFO
itself. As Alvin Lawson has pointed out, it has the general form of an eye in the
sky. (Lawson, 1982) This is an important point, since the context of the eye-like
UFO demonstrates its psychological origin beyond reasonable doubt.
Barney Hill’s UFO is not alone in the UFO literature in having a
resemblance to an eye, and it will doubtless be argued that coincidence could
account for some or all of these instances of eye-like UFOs. Flying saucers
oblige at least one circle in their form, and aesthetic symmetries would
doubtless lead to other circles and radiating lines. This writer agrees, yet we
can see the psychological processes at work, for example, in dreams reported in
Carl Jung’s book on flying saucers. Consider this one:
“I was walking, at night, in the streets of a city. Interplanetary ‘machines’
appeared in the sky, and everyone fled. The ‘machines’ looked like large steel
cigars. I did not flee. One of the ‘machines’ spotted me and came straight
towards me at an oblique angle. I think: Professor Jung says that one should not
run away, so I stand still and look at the machine. From the front, seen close to,
it looked like a circular eye, half blue, half white.
“A room in a hospital: my two chiefs come in, very worried, and ask my
sister how it was going. My sister replied that the mere sight of the machine
had burnt my whole face. Only then did I realize that they were talking about
me, and that my whole head was bandaged, although I could not see it.” (Jung,
1959)
Jung also reports on a woman’s dream about a black humming metallic
object like a spider with great dark eyes that flies over her. She was not clothed
and felt somewhat embarrassed. The spider flew alongside a large
administrative building in which international decisions were being made and
influenced people inside to go the way of peace, which was the way to the
inner, secret world. Obviously eyes are intimately associated with UFOs in the
unconscious. Eye-like UFOs are to be expected.
There may of course be perfectly plausible ways of explaining away the eye-
like nature of UFOs as a function of their observation equipment behaving like
the machinery of the human eye. There may be perfectly plausible ways of
explaining the cop-sunglasses eyes of Strieber’s aliens as the plausible product
of evolutionary adaptation to the environment of the planet from which they
came. But what really makes the most sense?
Carl Jung
In the final analysis, one has to go back to context. The eyes appear in
relationship to a web of paranoid themes in the UFO mythos and a structure of
paranoid development occurring in paranoid systems of thought. We also see
them in the context of a mythos grown up from Keyhoe in which aliens were
assumed to be spying on us. It is a context filled with apocalypses, amnesia,
persecutions, chases, influencing machines, and conspiracies. And always there
is furtiveness to allow evidence but never proof. So, what ultimately is the
more meaningful interpretation—extraterrestrials or superegos?
References
Adamski, George. Inside the Space Ships (Abelard-Schuman, 1955).
Andrus, Walter. “Air Intelligence Report No. 10-203-79” MUFON UFO Journal (July 1985).
Angelucci, Orfeo M. The Secret of the Saucers (Amherst Press, 1955).
Badcock, C.R. The Psychoanalysis of Culture (1980).
Bender, Albert K. “Editorial,” Space Review (April 1953).
Bender, Albert K. Space Review—Complete File (Saucerian Books, 1962).
Binder, Otto. Flying Saucers Are Watching Us (Tower, 1968).
Bloecher, Ted. Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 (privately published, 1967).
Bondarchuk, Yurko. UFO Sightings, Landings, and Abductions (Methuen, 1979).
Bord, Janet and Colin. Are We Being Watched? (Angus Robertson, 1980).
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (Viking, 1959; Penguin, 1985).
Cohn, Norman. Europe’s Inner Demons (Meridian, 1975).
Colp, Ralph. “Confessing a Murder,” Isis (1986).
DeMause, Lloyd. Foundations of Psychohistory (Creative Roots, 1982).
Edwards, Frank. Flying Saucers—Serious Business (Bantam, 1966).
Eichrodt, Walther. Theology of the Old Testament, Vol. 2 (SCM Press, 1967).
Eidelberg, Ludwig. Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (Free Press, 1968).
Erskine, Allen Louis. Why Are They Watching Us? (Tower, 1967).
Evans, Hilary. The Evidence for UFOs (The Aquarian Press, 1983).
Fawcett, Lawrence and Greenwood, Barry. Clear Intent (Prentice-Hall, 1984).
Fiore, Edith. Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by Extraterrestrials
(Doubleday, 1989).
Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned (Boni & Liveright, 1919).
Fowler, Raymond. UFOs: Interplanetary Visitors) (Prentice-Hall, 1974).
Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction” in Strachey, James, ed. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14 (The Hogarth Press, 1953).
Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey (The Dial Press, 1966).
Gallup, George. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, Volume 2 (1949-1958) (Random House, 1972).
Gibbons, Gavin. The Coming of the Space Ships (The Citadel Press, 1958).
Gillmor, Daniel S., ed. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (Bantam, 1969).
Godwin, Donald W. Anxiety (Oxford, 1986).
Good, Timothy. Above Top Secret (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1987; Morrow/Quill, 1988).
Gross, Loren E. Charles Fort, the Fortean Society and Unidentified Flying Objects. (privately published,
1976).
———. UFOs: A History, Vol. 1: July 1947-December 1948 (Arcturus Book Service, 1982).
———. UFOs: A History, Vol. 2: 1949 (Arcturus Book Service, 1983).
Grumet, Gerald W. “Eye Contact: The Core of Interpersonal Relatedness,” Psychiatry (May 1983).
Haines, Richard F. “A Review of Proposed Explanatory Hypotheses for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,”
Flying Saucer Review (February 1987).
Haining, Peter. Terror (A & W Visual Library, 1976).
Hall, Richard. Uninvited Guests. (Aurora, 1988).
Hamilton, William F. Close Encounter Report (Nexus, 1988).
Heard, Gerald. Is Another World Watching? (Harper, 1951).
Hervey, Michael. UFOs: The American Scene (St. Martin’s Press, 1976).
Hudson, Jan. Those Sexy Saucer People (Greenleaf Classics, 1967).
Jaynes, Julian. Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Houghton Mifflin,
1976).
Jessup, Morris K. The Case for the UFO (The Citadel Press, 1955; Vero edition/Saucerian, 1973).
John. The Etherean Invasion (Hwong, 1979).
Keen, Maurice. “A Master of the Middle Ages,” New York Review of Books (May 1989).
Keyhoe, Donald. “Flying Saucers Are Real” True (January, 1950).
———. The Flying Saucers Are Real (Fawcett, 1950).
———. Flying Saucers From Outer Space (Henry Holt, 1953).
———. Flying Saucers—Top Secret (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960).
———. Aliens From Space (Doubleday, 1973).
Kor, Peter. “Keyhoe’s Last Stand” Flying Saucers (September 1974).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Dying Worlds, Dying Selves,” UFO Brigantia (January 1991).
Kottmeyer, Martin. “Ufology Considered as an Evolving System of Paranoia,” in Stillings, Dennis, ed.
Cyberbiological Studies of the Imaginal Component in the UFO Contact Experience (Archaeus, 1989).
Lawson, Alvin. “Birth Trauma Imagery in CE-III Narratives” in International UPIAR Colloquium on
Human Sciences and UFO Phenomena Proceedings (July 1982).
Layne, Meade. The Coming of the Guardians (Borderland Sciences Research Foundation, 1972).
Leiber, Fritz. The Best of Fritz Leiber (Ballantine, 1974).
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Leslie, Desmond and Adamski, George. Flying Saucers Have Landed (British Book Centre/Werner Laurie,
1953).
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1975).
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Lorenzen, Coral and Jim. Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space (Berkley, 1977).
Lorenzen, Coral E. Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion From Outer Space
(Signet/NAL, 1966).
McCampbell, James M. UFOlogy (Celestial Arts, 1973).
McDonald, James E. “Science in Default: Twenty-two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations” in Sagan,
Carl and Page, Thornton, eds. UFOs: A Scientific Debate (Cornell University Press, 1972).
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Meslin, Michel. “Eye” in Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion,Vol. 5 (Macmillan, 1936).
Michel, Aimé. The Truth About Flying Saucers (Pyramid, 1967).
Mitchell, Helen and Betty. We Met the Space People (Galaxy, 1973).
Moskowitz, Sam. Strange Horizons: The Spectrum of Science Fiction (Scribner’s, 1976).
Neeley, Robert G. UFOs of 1896/1897: The Airship Wave (Fund for UFO Research, 1988).
Patai, Raphael. Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis
(Greenwich, 1983).
Ridpath, Ian. Messages From the Stars (Harper & Row, 1978).
Sachs, Margaret. The UFO Encyclopedia (Perigee, 1980).
Saggs, H.W.F. The Greatness that was Babylon (1962).
Salisbury, Frank. The Utah UFO Display (Devin-Adair, 1974).
Scully, Frank. Behind the Flying Saucers (Henry Holt, 1950).
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Steiger, Brad and Whritenour, Joan. Flying Saucers Are Hostile. (Ace, 1966).
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Service, 1982).
Strieber, Whitley. Communion (Beech Tree Books/William Morrow, 1987; Avon, 1988).
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Valerian, Valdamar. The Matrix (Arcturus Book Service, 1988).
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Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies. (MacFarland, 1982).
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Wilkins, Harold T. Flying Saucers on the Attack (Ace, 1967).
Williamson, George Hunt and McCoy, John. UFOs Confidential (privately published, 1958).
Williamson, George Hunt. The Saucers Speak (Neville Spearman, 1963).
religion and UFOs Religion is used by some in the UFO field to explain away
the existence of UFOs. It is used in the following form: “Religion and UFOs
have one thing in common: Both are make-believe.” In fact, UFOs are a
modern form of religion, something quasi-scientific, which have taken the
place of traditional ideas of angels and miracles. To some extent, the theories of
Carl Jung, found in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in
the Skies (1959), develop the view that saucer-shaped UFOs are symbolic of the
longing of the soul for unity. Therefore, UFOs may not be “real” in our usual
scientific sense. In the book edited by Carl Sagan and Thornton Page, UFOs—
A Scientific Debate (1972), the article by Sagan, “UFO’s: The Extraterrestrial
and Other Hypotheses,” and the article by the late Donald H. Menzel, “UFO’s
—The Modem Myth,” both develop the view that UFOs do not have any more
scientific reality than religion does. In effect, people like Sagan and Menzel use
religion to destroy the credibility of UFOs as a scientific study.
Could this have been the scene at Sodom and Gommorah?

(Painting by Monarca Lynn Merrifield)
As Sagan and Menzel use religion to get rid of UFOs, there are others who
use UFOs, and related subjects, to get rid of religion. Erich von Däniken’s
Chariots of the Gods? (1968), as well as his other works, represent this view.
Von Däniken deals mainly with the history of what he believes is
extraterrestrial visitation to Earth, in which space beings carried on experiments
in science with Earth people. Earth people fell in religious awe before advanced
space technology. The city of Sodom, von Däniken believes, was destroyed by
nuclear weapons in the hands of space beings. Likewise, the Exodus in the
Bible was the work of space beings carrying out a breeding experiment. Man,
in his ignorance, began to worship these beings. Von Däniken is very hostile
toward organized religion, especially his native Roman Catholic Church and its
priesthood, as may be seen from his attacks on it, especially in his book
Miracles of the Gods (1974). Von Däniken sees UFOs and the visitation of
“ancient astronauts” as “true science” and uses this “UFO science” to discredit
religion.
Angels announcing the birth of the savior
A third approach to UFOs and religion is to say “God is an astronaut” Von

Däniken used this approach to discredit religion, but R. L. Dione, in books such
as God Drives a Flying Saucer (1969), develops the view that the God of the
Bible is really an astronaut, a kind of Star Trek Captain Kirk, who for reasons
known only to himself decided to start the biblical religion. This “god” uses
advanced technology to perform the miracles in the Bible—everything from the
parting of the Red Sea to the artificial insemination of Mary so that Jesus could
be born and promote the work of the astronaut-god. The unfortunate thing
about Dione’s god is that he appears demonically deceptive, and, in fact, Dione
feels himself called to uncover the fraud which this technological god has
brought upon us: an astronaut who has tried to make us think he is really
divine!
A fourth approach to UFOs and religion is more complex, and suggests that
UFOs and religion may share a common ground in man’s unconscious or
psychic area. One approach in this area is directly religious, as in the work of
Ted Peters, UFOs—God’s Chariots? (1977), while another approach is more
secular, as in Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman’s book The Unidentified
(1975). Peters approaches the subject phenomenologically, making no decision
about the “reality” of UFOs, but pointing out that how a person sees a UFO
usually depends on what he is: Politicians see them as space visitors here to
establish contact, scientists see them as scientists here to study us, some
religious leaders see them as angels as found in the Bible. In other words,
man’s unconscious nature determines our UFO theories.
Clark and Coleman go even further. They argue that UFOs are a psychic
projection of man’s collective unconscious (drawing on C. G. Jung), a kind of
“poltergeist” phenomena. Their theory is able to draw together the physical and
psychological dimensions of the UFO problem better than most theories, but in
order to accept their view, one has to believe the human unconscious is capable
of powers unknown before. The theories of Peters and Clark and Coleman
might be summarized in terms of religion in this way: “If faith can move
mountains, then it can certainly create UFOs.”
A fifth theory joining UFOs and religion is that UFOs are demons. This
view is most popular among Christian fundamentalists and is expressed in the
work of John Weldon and Zola Levitt in UFOs: What on Earth is Happening?
(1975) and Clifford Wilson in his book UFOs and their Mission Impossible
(1974). These authors conclude that since UFOs will not reveal their true nature
to us, they are demonic. Weldon and Levitt use this approach in a fairly
traditional fundamentalist way: The world is coming to an end, Jesus is
returning, UFOs are a sign that the devil has been let loose; repent and be
saved. The weakness of both the above books is that they make no serious
attempt to relate their theory to the other possibility, that UFOs are in a sense
“good” angels as described in the Bible.
The sixth theory is that UFOs are some kind of divine power. This theory
has been developed in both a secular and religious form. Jacques Vallée has put
forth this theory in secular form in his book The Invisible College (1975). He
concludes his book with a chapter describing “The Next Form of Religion,” by
suggesting that UFOs are some kind of power which directs, at a deep
unconscious level, human destiny. Vallée does not call this power God,
although that has been the traditional name for such a power. I have developed
this theory from the more traditional point of view in my book The Bible and
Flying Saucers (1968) and in various articles. I have suggested that the “pillar
of cloud and fire” of the Exodus was what we now call a UFO, that it led the
way to the Red Sea, parted the water, fed Israel on manna, and led the way to
Mount Sinai, where Moses received all the commandments of the Jewish
religion. This, together with major UFO contacts with the prophets, represents
the “First Revelation” or the Old Testament. The “Second Revelation” concerns
the coming of Jesus, one called the son of God, who comes from the Higher
Reality into our reality to explain what life is about. Roughly the message of
life is this: Life is a three-stage process; (1) we begin in the dark in our
mother’s womb, and then are born into (2) a second womb, the world we see,
but in which we only begin to understand the nature of God, and then we are
born again into (3) the higher spiritual world, from which Jesus has come, and
to which we will go when we die, leaving our physical body behind as a baby
leaves the placenta.
UFO events in the New Testament include the bright light over the
shepherds at Christmas (Luke 2:9), the Baptism of Jesus (Matt. 3:16), the
Transfiguration of Jesus (Matt. 17:5), the Ascension of Jesus (Acts 1.9), and the
conversion of the Apostle Paul by a bright light on the Damascus Road (Acts
9:3). This theory of the Bible has been largely rejected by liberals because they
have tended to doubt the “reality” of miracles, angels, and life after death This
theory of the Bible has also been rejected by fundamentalist Christians in favor
of the “demon” view described above. The reason for this in part is that
Protestant fundamentalists do not expect to see any real divine activity now.
They tend to think God finished his work in the New Testament, with the
exception of the Second Coming of Christ. The idea that God might be doing
any obvious work is foreign to their doctrines.
Traditional religion has also rejected my views for the very good reason that
it raises some difficult issues. For instance, are UFOs really supernatural, or are
they just advanced technology? If one takes too technological an approach, God
seems to get left out, as in Josef Blunuich’s work The Spaceships of Ezekiel
(1974). But if one takes the spiritual approach, then why are UFOs apparently
acting like scientists who take Earth people on board to give physical exams, as
in the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case?
The tentative answer to these questions is: The supernatural is a very “free”
reality and can therefore take on technological form if it so desires.
In regard to “contact” cases like the Hills, it can be argued that they are
modern forms of “revelation,” and that contact must be interpreted
symbolically rather than literally. Thus, in the Betty and Barney Hill case, we
must see their examination as a way of saying to the whole human race: “We
know you inside and out, and we are watching you.” This is a very old biblical
religious message of what God’s angels are doing.
Recent studies have shown that people who have not had UFO contacts can,
under hypnosis, nevertheless be led very easily to tell of UFO contact
experiences. This does not mean the Hill case did not occur. It means that the
UFO reality has found a way to hide itself from our scientific study, while at
the same time making known to us what it wants to.
The miraculous conversion of St. Paul
Perhaps the one element that religion can contribute at this point to UFO
studies is one of attitude: humility. Religion has always approached God with
respect, seeking to know Him in His own terms, not by putting Him in a cage
like a rat. Science, in order to study UFOs, may have to learn from religion
that, whatever UFOs are, they are bigger than we are, and they had best be
treated with respect and humility.
—BARRY H. DOWNING
References
Blumrich, Josef F. The Spaceships of Ezekiel (Bantam Books, 1974).
Clark, Jerome, and Coleman, Loren. The Unidentified (Warner Paperback Library, 1975).
Dione, R. L. God Drives a Flying Saucer (Bantam Books, 1973).
Downing, Barry. The Bible and Flying Saucers (J. B. Lippincott, 1968; Avon, 1970; Sphere Books, 1973;
Marlowe, 1997).
Jessup, Morris K. UFO and the Bible (The Cidadel Press, 1956).
German edition published in 1958.
Peters, Ted. UFOs—God’s Chariots? (John Knox Press, 1977),
Sagan, Carl, and Page, Thornton, eds. UFOs—A Scientific Debate (W. W. Norton, 1974).
Vallée, Jacques. The Invisible College (E. P. Dutton, 1975).
Von Däniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (Bantam Books, 1970). Original German edtion published in
1968.
———. Miracles of the Gods (Dell, 1976).
Weldon, John, and Levitt, Zola. UFOs: What on Earth is Happening? (Harvest House, 1975)
Wilson, Clifford. UFOs and Their Mission Impossible (Signet/NAL, 1974)
religious movements and UFOs The UFO experience has seemed for many
fraught with spiritual or religious meaning. This is understandable, for the
sense of wonder evoked by the thought of otherworldly visitants flows easily,
for people of a certain susceptibility, into those feelings of the presence of the
numinous and the transcendent which characterizes religious experience.
The religious response to UFOs takes many forms. There are those for
whom it is purely personal and subjective. Others translate revelation of the
sacred meaning of UFOs into books and lectures, which win some attention but
do not form specific groups or movements. In still other cases, the response
takes the shape of a group with discernible structure and continuity, however
fragile and ephemeral it may appear in comparison with major religious
institutions. These groups may be called UFO religious movements.
A religious movement is more than a personal religious experience or belief,
but less than a religious institution. It catches up two or more people in the
mystique of the same experience and belief, it has some extension in time,
some distinct practices or meetings, and a definable sociology. In regard to the
last, generally one finds a leader endowed with charisma by a special blessing
he has received, and a tight or loose company of followers. Yet groups
concerned with the spiritual meaning of UFOs have generally not achieved the
permanence and institutional structure one would associate with a religion.
The connection of UFOs with the sacred has existed almost from the
beginning of modem UFOlogy with the 1947 sightings by Kenneth Arnold. In
the early 1950s, a number of contactee experiences were reported, the most
notable of them being probably those of Dan Fry in 1950; George Van Tassel in
1951; George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, and George Hunt Williamson in
1952; George King in 1954; and Orfeo Angelucci in 1955.
All of these persons lectured widely, wrote books about their experiences
that were widely read in saucerian circles, and gave glowing accounts of the
saucer people as being masters or elder brothers of the human race. These
“Space Brothers” are described as kind and wise beyond our imagining, and
able and eager to help us. Whether a simple contact with a message and vision
or a ride in the UFO—like a shaman’s flight—the experience in these cases had
all the overtones of an initiation into a universe of infinitely richer marvel and
meaning than the ordinary. It left the recipient with a sense of mission, of
having an ethic to follow and a message of hope or salvation to deliver.
The 1950s were, in fact, the golden age of UFO religion. The dazzlingly
beautiful and spiritual entities of these contact accounts contrast strikingly with
the bizarre, slit-mouthed UFO occupants (including the medical examiners) of
the 1960s and 70s reports. It was only of the 1950s type of contacts that
religious movements would likely be derived, and it was in the 1950s that the
major movements started. The 50s aliens were, in the words of the famous
analytic psychologist Carl G. Jung, “technological angels”—beings coming to a
scientific age in the vehicles required by its worldview but having the power
and mission of the mythic descending saviors and guardian spirits of old.
Several of these contacts developed into specific religious movements. Their
practices and forms of expression seem mostly derived from spiritualism, with
the principal contactee playing the role of a major me dium. Apart from the
initial hierophany, saucer contact is mostly “mental” and transmitted through
mediumship and automatic writing.
While most of these groups dwindled away in subsequent decades, other
UFO religions—like the Raelians—have achieved a significant following at the
start of the new millennium. Saucer group meetings typically consist of
lectures, chanting (which produces an atmosphere conducive to transmittal),
mediumistic messages from the saucer friends, and perhaps “circle” messages
in which various members of the group will spontaneously receive and
contribute to the transmission coming in. The scenario compares closely to the
format of spiritualist services and séances, and one is not surprised to find that
a large percentage of UFO religionists have a background in spiritualism and
other forms of occultism.
One of the oldest and most enduring of the saucer movements is
Understanding, Inc., founded by Dan Fry. The latter says that he had his initial
UFO experience in 1950, although the book describing it was not published
until 1954, the year before Understanding, Inc., was started. Fry states that on
July 4, 1950, he encountered a UFO when alone in the desert at the White
Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico; the celestial vehicle took him for a ride
to New York and back in half an hour. In the course of this journey he was
given instruction by ALan, his invisible mentor, on true science, the importance
of understanding, and information that the saucer people are the remnant of a
past supercivilization on Earth. The organization, however, has not been as
concerned with promoting these particular views as with providing a forum for
contactee and other saucerian speakers with a spiritual emphasis. In this
respect, it is different from most of the others, which are mediumistic and
related to particular saucer contacts.
The best-known of these is undoubtedly the Aetherius Society, founded by
the late George King in England, which is still active both there and in the
United States. It centers around transmissions through Mr. King from masters
on flying saucers and other planets. Members perform a diversity of spiritual
work under their direction designed to initiate a new spiritual age on Earth. The
services of Aetherius are rather formal. The inner group is close-knit and the
doctrine is heavily influenced by occultism of the theosophical sort.
Another activity which should be mentioned is the Giant Rock Space
Convention, formerly held by the contactee George Van Tassel at his small
airport near Yucca Valley, California, on the Mojave Desert between 1954 and
1970. The conventions were held for two days every September and brought
together many of the major religious contactees and their followers in the
atmosphere of a camp meeting, with speeches, transmissions, and fellowship
abounding.
Something of the saucerian atmosphere of the 1950s returned in 1975 with
the strange phenomenon of the movement headed by a man and a woman
called The Two, or Bo and Peep. After they gave lectures on UFOs in several
western cities, a couple of hundred people, mostly young, left all to follow
them to isolated mountain camps, where they would be purified in preparation
to being taken imminently by UFOs to a paradisal world. Many left when these
hopes were not immediately fulfilled, but a small core remained.
The cult later became known to the world as the infamous “Heaven’s Gate,”
shortly after their leader, Marshall Applewhite instigated a mass suicide of 39
cult members at Rancho Sante Fe, California, in March of 1997.
Robert Balch and David Taylor, in a sociological study of this group (years
before the mass suicide), determined something probably true of all UFO
religious movements: that the preponderance of participants were people with a
long history of involvement in other occult, spiritualist, and “metaphysical”
organizations.
Several scores of other groups qualify as UFO religious movements,
including the Solar Cross, the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs (led by
Gabriel Green), the Inner Circle, Light of the Universe, Solar Light Center,
Unarius, and the Etherean Society. One UFO group, which believed that the
world would be destroyed on a particular date when the Space Brothers would
rescue believers, but which transmuted the expected apocalypse into a spiritual
hope when the destruction and rescue did not take place, was the subject of a
celebrated sociological study, When Prophecy Fails (1956). Most, however,
have received little fame beyond their small host of friends and adherents. But
all represent modern transformations of humankind’s age-old need for wonder
and for supernormal companionship in this vast and lonely universe.
Rendlesham Forest incident Several UFO incidents, including multiple-

witness sightings by military personnel, ground traces and radioactive
anomalies were reported from Rendlesham Forest, an area between two British
NATO bases in Suffolk, East England. Both bases, RAF Bentwaters and RAF
Woodbridge (since closed down), were at that time leased to the U.S. Air Force.
The incidents took place between December 27 and 30, 1980. According to
an official report (dated January 13, 1981; released in 1983 under F.O.I.A.) by
RAF Woodbridge’s deputy base commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt, the events
were as follows:
1. Early in the morning of 27 December 1980, (approximately 0300L) two

USAF security police patrolmen saw unusual lights outside the back gate at
RAF Woodbridge. Thinking an aircraft might have crashed or been forced
down, they called for permission to go outside the gate to investigate. The
on-duty flight chief responded and allowed three patrolmen to proceed on
foot. The individuals reported seeing a strange glowing object in the forest.
The object was described as being metallic in appearance and triangular in
shape, approximately two to three meters [six to nine feet] across the base
and approximately two meters [six feet] high. It illuminated the entire forest
with a white light. The object itself had a pulsing red light on top and a
bank(s) of blue lights underneath. The object was hovering or on legs. As
the patrolmen approached the object it maneuvered through the trees and
disappeared. At this time the animals on a nearby farm went into a frenzy.
The object was briefly sighted approximately an hour later near the back
gate.
2. The next day, three depressions 1 ½” [inches] deep and 7” [inches] in

diameter were found where the object had been sighted on the ground. The
following night (29 Dec 80) the area was checked for radiation.
Beta/gamma readings of 0.1 milliroentgens were recorded with peak
readings in the three depressions and near the center of the triangle formed
by the depressions. A tree had moderate (.05-.07) readings on the side of the
tree towards the depressions.
3. Later in the night a red sun-like light was seen through the trees. It
moved about and pulsed. At one point it appeared to throw off glowing
particles and then broke into five separate white objects and then
disappeared. Immediately thereafter three star-like objects were noticed in
the sky…. The objects moved rapidly in sharp angular movements and
displayed red, green and blue lights. The objects to the north appeared to be
elliptical…. The object to the south was visible for two or three hours and
beamed down a stream of light from time to time. Numerous individuals,
including the undersigned, witnessed the activities in paragraphs 2 and 3.
Later, an audiotape was released which contained Col. Halt’s recording

during the nightly investigation in Rendlesham forest on the night of December
29, 1980. In this, Halt describes how first the animals of a nearby farm started
to make noise when he saw a “yellow thing” approaching and releasing
luminous “pieces.”
When it was only 200-300 yards away, the Colonel said “it looks like an eye
wink ing at you, still moving from side to side.” Furthermore he reported “one
object still hovering over Woodbridge base,” beaming down rays of light.
Already in January of 1981, the first rumors about the incident surfaced and
two local UFO investigators, Brenda Butler and Dot Street, started to
investigate. They were immediately confronted with bizarre rumors including
that base commander General Gordon Williams met three small humanoids
who came out in a beam of light from a landed UFO in Rendlesham forest on
December 27th. Still skeptical, they learned that an unidentified object was
recorded on radar at the time in question by RAF Wharton, a British air base.
During their investigation and also after the publication of their book Sky Crash
(together with Jenny Randles), Butler and Street were able to locate and
interview several dozen eyewitnesses of the event. The subsequent release of
the Halt memorandum confirmed most of their testimony. Furthermore,
interviewed by Omni editor Eric Mischera, Bentwaters Base Commander Col.
Ted Conrad confirmed: “It was a large craft, mounted on tripod legs. It had no
windows but was covered in red and blue lights. It definitely demonstrated
intelligent control. After almost an hour it flew off at phenomenal speed. It left
behind a triangular set of marks evidently formed by the tripod legs. A later
investigation proved the marks to be problematic.”
When this UFO landing seems to be an undebatable fact, other aspects of
several eyewitness testimonies are rather bizarre and were never confirmed,
including the claim of an encounter with small humanoids and even of
abduction-like experiences related to the sightings.
Two British Ministry of Defense officials, Ralph Noyes, a retired under-
secretary of the MoD, and Nick Pope of the MoD’s UFO Desk, inquired about
the incident. Pope learned about claims that the pencilthin rays beamed down
by the craft (mentioned by Col. Halt) penetrated the walls of the nuclear
weapon storage areas of RAF Woodbridge.
On July 24, 1996, the Rendlesham Forest Incident became subject of a
Parliamentary Questioning by the British House of Commons representative
Mr. Redmond. The reply of the MoD spokesman Mr. Soames was that the
incident contained “nothing of defense significance” and that therefore “no
further action was taken.”
—MICHAEL HESEMANN
Report On Communion (William Morrow, 1989). San Antonio newspaper

reporter Ed Conroy, after interviewing San Antonio native Whitley Strieber for
a feature story, decided to investigate Strieber’s alien abduction account in
more depth by interviewing his family and friends and by following Strieber
around. Conroy describes in this book how he began to experience his own
nighttime visitations by mysterious entities and buzzings at all hours by
unmarked helicopters.
Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, The (Doubleday, 1956). Former

chief of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, Edward J. Ruppelt, who first coined
the term Unidentified Flying Object (UFO), describes the most intriguing cases
of his two years spent investigating UFO reports. He tells how he was under
orders to publicly discuss only the sightings that had been solved and to
denigrate the significance of the 20 percent of cases investigated that remained
unexplained.
reptoids The word reptoid is considered by UFO buffs to be a contraction of

reptilian humanoid rather than an exotic form of reptile. They are invariably
bipedal with a human torso. The word is first used among UFO buffs in the mid
to late 1980s in the context of EBE lore surrounding the Dulce Base. Earlier,
the word appeared in comic books. It appears in the 1977 Thor Annual #6
(Marvel comics) as the name of a species of bipedal reptiles inhabiting the
planet Tayp circling a distant star called Kormuk.
Reptilian aliens are second only to humanoid forms in their popularity
among comic book aliens. A file of alien races from The Official Handbook of
the Marvel Universe has nineteen reptilian races. Though far less than the
ninety-one humanoid and semi-humanoid races listed, it is well more than the
eight examples of insectoid races and three examples of amoeboid races. Still
farther down in frequency are forms based on fish, plants, cats, dogs, snails,
horses, hippos, pigs, and sentient energy. Examples in the science fiction
tradition go back as far as the highly intelligent reptiles on a planet around the
star Mirach in Edgar Fawcett’s The Ghost of Guy Thyrle (1895). Pulp-master
Edmond Hamilton has a race of lizard-men threatening the doom of mankind in
“The Abysmal Invaders”(1929).
Adding animal features to the human form is arguably the oldest known act
of mythic imagination. The earliest known work of art is a handsome lion/man
carved from ivory dating back over 30,000 years and found in southern
Germany. Cave art in southern France, nearly as old, shows a figure combining
the head and torso of a bison to human legs. In the French prehistoric cave art
gallery of Lascaux can be found bird-headed men. At Trois Freres an upright
figure combines human legs and upright posture to parts from horses, reindeers,
and felines. (Mithin, 1976)
Michael Harner, anthropologist and specialist in shamanic visions, has
observed that snakes and jaguars populate visions in many cultures and he cites
many examples from the anthropological literature. “Serpents certainly recur in
the visions, and crocodiles and reptiles in general, and so do tigers, leopards
and cats; but fangs also do, and birds of prey and vampires, and perhaps all of
these are interrelated by their implication of danger….” (Harner, 1973)
Their deadliness makes them figures not only to fear, but to identify with. If
one could harness their power, one could strike fear into one’s enemies.
Mythologists will tell you, “There is probably no creature which is found more
widely distributed in the mythologies of the world than the serpent.”
(Cavendish, 1985) Examples include the Egyptian crocodile god Sebek, the
Hindu Nagas, the Toltec Quetzalcoatl, the Greek Typhon, and the Biblican
Serpent of Eden.
The current presence of reptoids within UFOlogy is less a puzzle than their
absence in the early years of the UFO controversy. This absence was likely
caused by a general sensibility in the early years that aliens would be
benevolent or at least neutral. Reptiles however seem inherently to be felt to be
dangerous. Such presumptions favored the contactees’ utopians and the
UFOlogists’ big-brained humanoids over other forms. As sensibilities changed
in the sixties we see horror clichés like mummies and Big Bugs enter the
mythos. A crocodile-skinned alien turns up in the 1967 David Seewaldt
abduction of Calgary, Canada. It had holes for a nose and holes for ears and a
slit mouth. It could arguably be called a reptoid though it doesn’t have a
compelling resemblance to later examples of the form. It gained little attention.
(Allen, 1974) A crocodile-skinned biped turns up in the 1975 Brian Scott
abduction, but it seems more humanoid than reptilian. (Lawson, 1976) The
1978 Zanfretta abduction from Marzano, Italy, got attention but was quickly
dismissed in America as too blatantly identical to The Creature from the Black
Lagoon (1954). (Steinman, 1986)
In 1980, Leonard Stringfield indicates his sources in the crash-retrieval tales
he has been collecting speak of aliens generally having a scaly or reptilian skin
and a medical authority confirms that under the microscope resembled mesh-
like, granular skin of iguanas and chameleon. Though the rest of the alien
seems more like a Gray, this description set the precedent for later speculations
in Stringfield’s Status Report III (1982), Bernard Finch’s “Dinosaurs…Not
Humanoids” for Flying Saucer Review (Finch 1982), and Erich Aggan’s
“Possible Reptilian Origins of Certain UFO Occupants” for MUFON. (Aggan,
1982). Also in 1982, Dale Russell got widespread attention for a museum
exhibition in which he speculated how a dinosaur called the Stenony-
chosauraus could have evolved into an intelligent biped.(Hecht & Williams,
1982) Carl Sagan, in the award-winning The Dragons of Eden (1977), had
given this idea some prominence a few years earlier.
The culture accentuated the popularity of the form in the mid-1980s. In
1983, a TV mini-series called “V” gained high ratings for alien reptoids
disguised as humans in order to steal the Earth’s water. This stimulated a
number of imitations including Dreamscape’s Snakeman (1984), Buckaroo
Banzai’s lectroid Emilio Lizardo (1984), and the Draks of Enemy Mine (1985).
In 1987, the Lear statement spread Dulce Base revelations about frightening
creatures with reptilian skin and claw-like fingers. Whistleblowers speak of
cases of lizard-humans in Level 7, “Nightmare Hall,” and cages of Draco-
Reptoids. (Bishop III, 1989) Tal Levesque indicated the Grays and reptoids are
in league with each other and a planetoid bearing the ruler race of reptoids was
headed to Earth to oversee an invasion. (Cosmic Awareness, n.d.) One source
said this would occur approximately 1999. (Wingate, 1999)
By the time of 1992 M.I.T. Abduction Study Conference, John Carpenter
indicated about ten percent of the aliens being seen in abductions collected by
himself were reptilian. Three of nine abduction investigators had not seen any
however. (Pritchard, 1994 ) As the nineties proceed some sources reveal that
reptoids can cross-breed with anybody and they rape women. One woman
sheepishly tells Carpenter they gave her an incredible orgasm despite their
repulsive looks. (Carpenter, 1999) Pamela Stone-brooke, a jazz singer, is the
most vocal woman to speak of her sexual encounters with reptoids. Dense New
Age metaphysics accompany her claims. (greatdreams.com, 1999)
Drawings of the reptoids are inconsistent, but some bear close resemblance
to Dale Russell’s evolved dinosaur from 1982. Joe Lewels indicates his
abductees cannot bear to look at photos of the Russell creation because the
resemblance is so close to the terrifying beings. (Lewels, 1997) Though Lewels
seems to regard this similarity as a vote for the plausibility of such beings, this
overlooks the fact that Russell’s creation is highly speculative. Certain things
like the absence of ears and yellow eyes with vertical slit pupil are pure
guesswork, since fossils obviously do not preserve such things. Russell
specifically admits the ears were omitted strictly as an artistic choice to avoid a
more human appearance. (Hecht & Williams, 1982)
Lore about the reptoids expanded tremendously throughout the nineties. The
inconsistencies of form resolve to the existence of different reptoid races. Their
history extends to ancient times. One source said reptilians were slaves to the
Grays, but they are more commonly felt to be their rulers. This however runs
counter to other sources who say mantis aliens rule the Grays. We are told they
eat children like we eat chicken deepening their image of natural evil. The
Chupacabra (goat-sucker) of Puerto Rico is revealed as a reptoid-Gray
crossbreed and adds vampirism to their image.
Web sites have sprung up devoted to warning people about these evil beings.
David Icke’s “Reptilian Research” is the most expansive with a section
detailing the history of serpent mythology and another that gathers together
some lurid tales of reptoid rape. Another site called “Reptoids.com” offers a
typology and a collection of popular reptilian images from television and film.
These images are not regarded as sources of reptilian mythology, but rather as
ways of preparing the populace for the reptoid takeover. Another called “The
Reptilians: Who are They Really” collects documents of the Stonebrook
controversy and information about reptoid caverns, but is notable for a large
selection of links demonstrating the amount of material about reptoids around
and the nature of the beliefs of those drawn to the subject.
It needs to be said that the concept of reptoids is undoubtedly less troubling
to scientific sensibilities than certain other alien forms like blonde Nordics—
too precisely like us (Fortey, 1997)—and the bioengineering absurdity of big
Mantis beings. Some will argue that large brains require warm-blooded
physiologies and placental gestation, but the different evolutionary pathways
explored on alien worlds may open up combinations of traits we could scarcely
predict on first principles. There are such unforeseeably bizarre strategies found
both in present life and the fossil record on earth that it is hard to regard the
reptilian-biped combination as fundamentally unthinkable.
The more compelling objection to reptoids is that the culture finds them
such readily compelling villains. It had been using them for years before they
started appearing in UFO encounters and there is absolutely no mystery from
an anthropological standpoint why such a mythical being could emerge within
modern visionary experiences and stories.
References
Aggan, Erich A. “Possible Reptilian Origins of Certain UFO Occupants,” MUFON UFO Journal (August
1982).
Allen, W.K. “Crocodile-Skinned Entities at Calgary,” Flying Saucer Review (1974).
Bishop III, Jason. “The Dulce Base,” UFO magazine (July/August 1989).
Buhler, Walter K., Pereira, Guilherme and Pires, Ney. “UFO Abduction at Mirassol,” UFO Photo Archives
(1985).
Carpenter, John. “Reptilians and Other Unmentionables,” MUFON UFO Journal (April 1973).
Cavendish, Richard. Man, Myth, Magic (Marshall Cavendish, 1985).
Cosmic Awareness “Reptoids can Recognize All is One and Still Eat You” (http://ufobbs.com/ufo)
Fortey, Richard. Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (Vintage, 1997).
Harner, Michael. Hallucinogens and Shamanism (Oxford University Press, 1973).
Hecht, Jeff and Williams, Gurney. “Smart Dinosaurs,” Omni magazine (May 1982).
Lawson, Alvin. “Hypnotic Regressions of Alleged CE III Encounters: Ambiguities on the Road to UFOs”
in Dornbos, Nancy, ed. Proceedings of the 1976 CUFOS Conference (CUFOS, 1976).
Lewels, Joe. The God Hypothesis (Wild Flower Press, 1997).
Mithin, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science (Thames
and Hudson, 1996).
Pritcahrd, Andrea, et.al. Alien Discussions (North Cambridge, 1994).
“The Reptilians: Who Are They Really” (www.greatdreams.com/reptilan/reps.htm)
Sagan, Carl. The Dragons of Eden (Random House/Ballantine, 1977).
Stringfield, Leonard. UFO Crash-Retrievals: Status Report II (Privately published, 1980).
Stringfield, Leonard. UFO Crash-Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence: Status Report III (Privately
published, 1982).
Steinman, William and Stevens, Wendelle. UFO Crash at Aztec (UFO Photo Archives, 1986).
Wingate, Steve. “An Alien Update: How Close are the Reptoids,” IUFO Mailing List webarchive (January
14, 1999).
resistance techniques against alien abduction A careful study of “alien

abduction-scenarios” will demonstrate to objective minds that this is a
phenomenon separate and distinct from the physical, craft-like phenomenon we
normally call “UFOs.” True UFOs are viewed in full waking consciousness,
caught on film and radar, and chased by jet pilots, while most abduction
scenarios take place in sleep or are induced in light trances such as road
hypnosis and other altered states. Retrieval of abduction stories through
hypnotic regression adds to the suspicion that they are not physically real.
Fifteen years of research in Tujunga, California revealed that three of these
five abductee witnesses instinctively fended off subsequent approaches of
“abductors.” (Their experiences were described in my 1988 book, Tujunga
Canyon Contacts.) Attempts to bring this new aspect to the attention of the
field between 1988 and 1992 has resulted in bitter controversy. Although many
researchers welcomed this new information, others contended that resistance to
“alien abductors” was impossible. They presented contradictory theories: (1)
the abductors are technologically superior ETs and humans are powerless
against them; or (2) abductors are here to “save” us or help us toward a higher
stage of evolution and therefore should not be resisted.
Feedback to my initial articles on the subject resulted in seventy additional
resisters coming forward, the majority of whom had instinctively freed
themselves of abduction scenarios. My subsequent 1998 book, How to Defend
Yourself Against Alien Abduction describes nine specific resistance techniques:
1) mental struggle, in which the witnesses deliberately return to full
waking consciousness, resulting in the breaking of the scenario;
2) physical struggle, in which the witnesses physically attack the entities,
resulting in the entities’ rapid departure;
3) appeal to spiritual personages such as the Sacred Heart, Allah or the
archangel St. Michael, which brings about an “awakening”;
4) repellents such as iron objects, small electrical appliances (whirling
fans, room heaters, etc.) and time-favored herbs such as pennyroyal and St.
John’s Wort, which prevent the entities’ approach;
5) righteous anger, whereby witnesses, in heightened self esteem, express
their inalienable rights against intrusion;
6) protective rage, directed toward protecting one’s family members as
well as oneself;
7) support from family members, where housemates assist in breaking the
abductee’s altered state;
8) metaphysical methods, such as visualizing white light, which provide
protection and break the scenario;
9) intuition, which enables witnesses to detect the approach of the entities
so that techniques can be readied before the scenario begins.
A combination of techniques is usually necessary for full success. Resistance

techniques are most effective when used by stout-hearted, strong-minded
individuals who instinctively resent intrusion. They can be learned by witnesses
who consider abduction scenarios as unwelcome experiences which interfere
with their lives. Abductees who crave constant attention from researchers and
other abductees are not good candidates for successful resistance.
The escalation of claims of “implants” and “hybridization” from 1973
through the 1990s seems to have been heightened by a combination of
unconscious telepathic leakage between witnesses and even the most careful
hypnotist/researchers, plus unrecognized psychological needs of the individuals
involved. Strong doubts of the physical reality of abductions and reports of
“missing fetuses,” “genetic manipulation,” and “alien-military cooperation” (all
of which lack scientific proof) are needed to build up an individual’s
confidence.
Many abduction scenarios seem to be “real” in some type of altered reality,
especially those reported by rational, honest individuals, but respected
researchers such as Jacques Vallée and Gordon Creighton suspect that
abductees are interacting not with extraterrestrials, but with “interdimensional”
beings who share the Earth with us on a “hidden plane.” Historical and
philosophical texts as well as legends and folklore from such diverse cultures as
China, Persia, Slovenia, Australia, Italy, and Ireland all describe deceptive
entities who delight in assaulting human beings, usually in a sexual manner.
Sexual manipulation is part and parcel of the modern abduction phenomenon in
all its forms—as in other myths throughout history.
The order of creation described in the Koran as “Al-jinn,” in Celtic
chronicles as “Sidhe,” and in European history as “Incubi” (and “Succubi”) acts
in ways similar to our modern “alien abductors.” They reportedly have the
ability to shape-shift and enter Earth’s space-time at will. They usually appear
to humans in forms consistent with the victims’ own cultural backgrounds. The
modern American “abduction phenomenon” appears as “space travelers”—a
form which it possibly reasoned could terrify even independent, free
Americans.
It is to be hoped that our culture will realize that “alien abductors” are
merely the newest form of entities which have traumatized other cultures from
the beginning. The most important point here is that multiple world cultures
have recognized the phenomenon for what it is and found ways to deal with it,
using methods very similar to the techniques described above.
—ANN DRUFFEL
References
Druffel, Ann, and Scott Rogo. Tujunga Canyon Contacts (Prentice-Hall, 1988).
Druffel, Ann. How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction (Three Rivers Press/Random House,
1998).
Revelations (Ballantine Books, 1991). A proliferation of spurious government

documents such as MJ-12 helped persuade Jacques Vallée that some aspects of
the UFO phenomenon may be covert government experiments in the
manipulation of public belief systems. He relates a story in which he and Dr. J.
Allen Hynek were deceived by two Air Force generals, both UFO believers,
who promised to release genuine UFO evidence but never did because they
were only promoting their own personal agendas. While he believes a real UFO
mystery exists, he is nonetheless disturbed that “somebody is going to a lot of
trouble to convince us of the reality of extraterrestrials, to the exclusion of
other, possibly more important hypotheses about UFOs.”
Roach abduction In 1975, Pat Roach (originally identified as Pat Price to

protect her identity), a divorcee living alone with her seven children, wrote to
Kevin Randle and Saga magazine, telling of her abduction. She said that she
knew how whole families could disappear. Her letter was inspired by a report in
Saga’s UFO Report that told of the abduction of Dionisio Llanca, an Argentine
truck driver.
According to Roach, she had gone to sleep on the evening of October 16,
1973, and had been awakened just after midnight. Convinced that a prowler had
been in the house, she called the police. A record of that report was found,
providing both the date of the incident and a corroboration for part of the story.
Although Roach remembered almost nothing about the incident, her children
had suggested that there had been “spacemen” in the house. Under hypnotic
regression conducted by Dr. James A. Harder, then APRO’s Director of
Research, Roach began to tell a tale of alien abduction. She claimed that she
had been awakened by two smallish creatures standing near her couch, looking
at her. They reached down, touched her arms, and lifted her. She saw some of
her children in the room, struggling with the aliens. They were then floated
outside and into a craft standing in an empty field next to the house. Inside the
ship, she was undressed and examined by the creatures, shown some of their
advanced technology, hypnotized by the aliens so she could recall some of her
life for them, and finally given her clothes and told to dress.
Some of the details of the abduction were corroborated by her daughter,
Bonnie, but the descriptions were not as rich as those given by her mother.
Attempts to learn more about the abduction by interviewing the other children
failed to reveal much additional detail.
An examination of the transcripts of the hypnotic regression sessions, as
well as information provided by Harder, both during those sessions and
discussions afterward, tainted the case. Harder, after completing the first
regression session, expressed concern that Roach had not exhibited the “proper
emotional” response. He told her throughout the session that he knew she had
been scared, but that she got out of the situation in good shape. It was also
Harder who had suggested that Roach had been examined, telling her about the
Betty Hill abduction. In a later hypnotic regression, Roach claimed to have
undergone a similar examination.
Other sources of contamination were found. Much of the description of the
interior of the ship came from an article in UFO Report that Roach, in her first
letter, acknowledged reading. Many of her descriptions match those of Llanca,
not because she had seen the same things, but because she had read about them
months earlier.
In my original entry for The Encyclopedia of UFOs (1980), I concluded that
“…until something more was added, an admission by Roach, or a new
development in psychological study (or the landing of a spaceship), there didn’t
seem to be any place to go with the case.” That development has since
occurred, in what we now know about a psychological phenomenon called
“sleep paralysis.” (See SLEEP PARALYSIS.) The Roach abduction now appears to
be a classic example of sleep paralysis.
Roach, remember, claimed to have awakened and felt that a prowler had
been in, or near the house. She had a vague feeling about it and called the
police. Then, thinking about it, and reading about alien abductions, she came to
believe that she, herself, had been an abduction victim. The details that
emerged under hypnosis probably resulted from constant prodding by Harder,
including his leading questions to her.
The details of the abduction provided by her children could easily have
come from discussions Roach had with them prior to her writing to UFO
Report.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
References
Randle, Kevin D. “Roach abduction” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs
Randle, Kevin D. and Estes, Russ. Faces of the Visitors (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1997).
Randle, Kevin D., Estes, Russ, and Cone, William P. The Abduction Enigma (Forge, 1999).
Robertson Panel The first scientific advisory panel on UFOs. requested by

the White House and sponsored by the United States Central Intelligence
Agency, was convened by Dr. H. P. Robertson (a world-renowned physicist
then at the California Institute of Technology), on January 14, 1953. The other
panel members included Luis W. Alvarez (later Nobel laureate and professor of
physics at the University of California at Berkeley), Lloyd Berkner (noted
space scientist), Sam A. Goudsmit (nuclear physicist at the Brookhaven
National Laboratory), and the writer (then an astronomer and operations analyst
at the Johns Hopkins University). It was just after the 1952 UFO scare in
Washington, D.C., and Robertson took his responsibility of advising the federal
government very seriously. He demanded and got access to all top-secret
military data that might bear on UFO sightings, such as tests of new aircraft,
rockets, and balloons. As an astronomer, this writer felt that most of the
sightings were ludicrous and joked about it in our first meeting. Robertson
reprimanded the writer severely, despite the fact that he was an old friend. The
panel was briefed by all three military services, and by astronomer J. Allen
Hynek, then scientific advisor to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. The panel
was shown most of the good photos and drawings of UFO sightings. and the
movie taken by an obviously reliable Navy man, Delbert Newhouse, at
Tremonton, Utah. The panel’s explanation of the objects on the film, which was
later agreed upon by the investigator for the University of Colorado UFO
Project, was seagulls, a half-mile away, rather than fantastic spacecraft ten
miles away. Captain E. J. Ruppelt, then head of Project Blue Book, described
the Air Force analysis of UFO reports. All day on January 18, 1953, the panel
discussed the evidence, and concluded that UFOs presented no direct threat to
United States national security. The writer was concerned that, at a time of a
“Red threat” (the panelists were worried about a possible Soviet
intercontinentaI ballistic missile attack), UFO reports would disrupt military
communications. The panel agreed and also recommended that efforts be made
to strip UFOs of “the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired” and to
educate the public to recognize "true indications of hostile intent or action.”
The Robertson Panel report was later declassified and (with most names
deleted) published as Appendix U in Edward Condon’s Scientific Study of
Unidentified Flying Objects, edited by Daniel S. Gillmor, 1969.
In retrospect, this writer sees a few misconceptions in the panel’s discussion
and report. The panel underestimated the long duration of public interest in
UFOs, which also puzzles sociologists (see Sagan, Carl, and Page, Thomton,
eds., UFOs–A Scientific Debate, 1972), and overestimated the astronomers’
photographic coverage of the sky (see Page, “Photographic Sky Coverage for
the Detection of UFOs,” in Science, Vol. 160, No. 1258, 1968). Although the
panel did not go as far as Condon, it also tended to ignore the 5 percent or 10
percent of UFO reports that are highly reliable and have not as yet been
explained.
—THORNTON PAGE
Rogo hypothesis Parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo developed the hypothesis

that abduction experiences could be correlated with a personal crisis and
emotional trauma in the life of the abductee. His idea was that we should look
more closely at the experiencer in terms of personal history and how the
“abduction” experience can shed light on one’s life crisis—in symbolic form.
The following essay was given to the editor of this encyclopedia for publication
by Scott Rogo in 1983, seven years before his untimely death (in 1990).
THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF UFO ABDUCTIONS
Reports about people who have been abducted by UFOs have become
frighteningly frequent over the last few years. These reports often read
surprisingly alike. The victim or victims will be driving along a deserted road
late at night when the UFO makes its first appearance. The individual will then
momentarily “black out.” [A phenomenon now referred to in UFOlogy as
“missing time.”] Regaining consciousness only a “moment” or so later, he or
she will discover that over an hour or two has mysteriously passed from his/her
life. The witness might then be asked by an investigator to undergo hypnotic
regression, during which one will remember how the car stalled and how alien
beings left the UFO and brought the chosen one aboard. Many UFO abductees
tell how they were given medical examinations or given some sort of message
before being returned to their cars with the command to forget what has
happened.
The explanation for such events seems obvious. UFOs appear to be vehicles
from another world, and their occupants carry out these abductions with the
intent of studying and learning about us. However, as a result of my own
research and investigations into several UFO abduction cases, I have come to a
radically different conclusion about the nature of these experiences
I first began to seriously question the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” after
studying the case of Betty and Barney Hill, which was made famous by author
John Fuller in his book The Interrupted Journey (1966). The case is so well
known that only a very brief summary needs to be given here.
The date of the incident was September 19, 1961—a time when the civil
rights movement was in its infancy. Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial
couple from New Hampshire who were driving home from a vacation trip to
Canada through the White Mountains of New England, when they first spotted
a mysterious light high in the sky. It gradually approached them as they sped
along.
Barney eventually stopped the car, got out, and viewed the “craft” through
binoculars when it began hovering by the side of the road. When he saw beings
inside it, he panicked, ran back to the automobile, and sped away.
The next thing the Hills noticed was that they were driving somewhat
further down the road. They could also hear a “beeping” sound fading out as
they drove. Later, they calculated that their trip home had taken longer than it
should have.
Just ten days following the experience, Betty began having a series of
detailed nightmares about a UFO abduction. Barney, too, was feeling some sort
of strain—presumably as a result of the UFO experience—as his ulcer began
acting up.
These developments led the Hills to Dr. Benjamin Simon, a psychiatrist in
Boston who specialized in hypnosis. The Hills assumed they were suffering
from a case of amnesia, and on this basis Dr. Simon explored the supposed
time-lapse through hypnotic regression. It was during these sessions that the
couple gradually “recalled” how their car had been stopped by mysterious
figures ahead of them in the road as they drove away from the UFO.
They remembered being taken aboard the craft by humanoid beings, who
separated them and then performed quasi-medical procedures on them
individually. The beings tested Betty for pregnancy by inserting a needle into
her navel (a procedure similar to amniocentesis). They took sperm samples
from Barney, after placing some sort of cup over his groin. Then the couple was
returned to their car with instructions to forget the whole experience.
When I read John Fuller’s book, which includes transcripts of the Hills’
sessions with Dr. Simon, I was left unimpressed. What struck me at the time
was how symbolic their experience was, and how it seemed to relate so
concisely with conflicts which must have been plaguing the couple at the time.
Barney, a black postal employee, had married a socially prominent white
woman (Betty) at a time when racial strife in this country was developing into
the most important social issue of the decade. Surely the Hills must have been
harboring some deep, and perhaps not even consciously acknowledged,
conflicts over their interracial marriage, especially since such unions were rare
and socially frowned upon at that time.
These quite normal fears and conflicts are aptly illustrated in their abduction
story. Here, Betty and Barney are separated by hostile and mysterious
impersonal beings, who check to make sure Betty isn’t pregnant, and then
symbolically castrate Barney.
Only then are they released to continue on their way. This scenario
encapsulates the Hills’ own awareness of how much of society probably viewed
their marriage—a sensitivity they must have had as they lived their day-to-day
lives in a traditionally conservative area of the United States. (In a classic
experiment, a psychologist instructed several white subjects to administer
shocks to black volunteers. He found that the subjects would consistently
administer more powerful shocks to the blacks—whom they were led to believe
were dating white women—than the control subjects.)
What the Hills’ abduction story seems to represent is a sort of “dream” in
which the couples’ own fears and anxieties were translated into a symbolic
drama. When I realized the symbolic nature of the Hills’ experience, I rejected
the notion that they had undergone a genuine abduction. I felt that their
recollections, which were based point-by-point on Betty’s previous dreams,
were on Betty’s previous dreams, were merely fantasies in which the Hills
expressed their anxieties over the nature of their marriage. The “missing time”
they experienced after their encounter may have been a temporary amnesia
brought on by the shock of actually seeing a genuine UFO. But it is also
interesting to note that the “missing two hours” was not noticed by the Hills,
until someone else made the suggestion to them—two weeks after the event.
Over the years, however, I had to change my opinion. Two abduction cases
came to light in the 1970s, which placed the UFO abduction syndrome on a
firmer evidential footing.
The first was the Pascagoula, Mississippi, abduction of Charles Hickson and
Calvin Parker on October 11, 1973. Hickson consciously remembered the
abduction and had no need of hypnotic regression. Independent evidence has
documented that UFO activity was rife in Mississippi that night as well. The
other case was the November 5, 1975, abduction (near Snowflake, Arizona) of
Travis Walton, whose encounter was partially witnessed by several of his
coworkers. With cases such as these, there can be no denying that UFO
abductions are real events and a genuine component of the UFO mystery.
The natural implication of all this might be that the Hill abduction of 1961
was also a genuine occurrence. But why, then, should the scenario of the Hills’
experience—granting that it really happened as reported—be so rich in
symbolic allusions to their social, psychological, and sexual concerns?
It was this question that piqued my interest in the deeper meaning of the
UFO abduction syndrome and led me to study it in some detail. My current
view is that while UFO abductions are genuine events, they are much more
complicated than most people suspect. The first (and major) case that helped
me formulate my views about the nature of the UFO abduction syndrome was
brought to my attention in 1978 by Ann Druffel, a Southern California UFO
investigator of some 20 years’ experience.
Ann was still investigating a UFO ab duction which had occurred in the
Tujunga Canyons, near Los Angeles, on March 22, 1953. The victims were
Sara Shaw and Jan Whitley, two young women who were sharing a one-
bedroom cabin in the Canyons at the time. When Sara Shaw first met Ann she
couldn’t remember much about her frightening experience. She explained only
that she had awakened in the dead of night, when an odd light began to shine
into her window. Simultaneously, an odd silence came over the area. Both she
and Jan had just gotten out of bed to see what the cause of the light might be,
she explained, when they found themselves paralyzed. An “instant” later they
realized that over two hours had passed. Sara could remember nothing more.
Sara eventually moved away from Jan, developed a compulsive urge to
study medicine, and later experienced a “flash of insight” in which she
envisioned a cure for cancer. She did not, however, relate these new
developments in her life to her experience of March 1953. She only began to
think in terms of a possible UFO encounter some twenty years later, when the
subject of UFOs and UFO abductions began receiving a great deal of attention
in the media.
Ann Druffel eventually had Sara hypnotically regressed on three occasions:
December 5, 1975; February 26, 1976; and (in my presence) on October 22,
1978—which shed new light on the 1953 experience.
A typical abduction scenario unfolded during these sessions. Sara
remembered that a group of skinny, black-garbed aliens teleported into her
cabin through a closed window. They took hold of Jan and herself and floated
them outside to a UFO. Jan fought against them, but Sara was curiously
indifferent to what was happening. She found the aliens friendly and thought
the experience was “sort of fun,” to use her own words.
The two women were separated and Sara recalled being given a physical
examination by the male entities, who undressed her as the female aliens stood
back passively. She was then taken to a conference room where she was told
about a cure for cancer. Then she and Jan were returned to their home.
Unfortunately, Jan could never be successfully hypnotized, because she is
extremely resistant to suggestion. So she has never been able to verify Sara’s
recollections. However, even today she recalls waking up, seeing the light, and
finding herself paralyzed.
The Sara Shaw case gave me the opportunity for which I had been waiting—
the chance to make a detailed psychological study of a UFO abductee. I had
found that most reports on abduction cases have focused more on the witness’s
reported experiences than on the witnesses themselves . I hoped to rectify this
situation with my investigation of the Shaw case.
I therefore made a detailed study of Ms. Shaw, which included going over
her present concerns and thoughts about her experience, talking to her about
her childhood, and also taking a complete sexual history. It was during this
process that I discovered that Sara’s abduction experience, far from being an
alien kidnapping, seemed to encapsulate and dramatize several conflicts which
were plaguing her at the time, As I talked with Sara I learned that she came
from a rather disturbed family background.
She had been taught to avoid contact with men by an extremely dominant
mother, who had imbued in Sara some rather antiquated views about relations
with the opposite sex. This indoctrination had so profoundly affected Sara that
the (then) young woman had decided, in an unconscious attempt to please her
mother, that she would cut herself off from normal contact with men.
She became roommates with a young woman who made independence a
virtue and went “off to the wilds” to live an almost hermit-like existence away
from men and society in general. She lived with Jan for two years before
realizing that her life was not very fulfilling. After much professional
counseling, she lost her distrust of men and eventually entered into two
marriages. Unfortunately, neither marriage was successful.
Today, Sara is a single woman engaged in her own career. Sara’s UFO
abduction experience makes considerable sense when viewed in the light of her
background, since her story contains some rather overt (though symbolic)
allusions to the conflicts which eventually led her to seek counseling.
Just take a look at her recollections. She remembered how strange
overpowering figures entered into her bedroom, abducted her, and separated
her from Jan. Oddly, though, Sara found this adventure fun and realized that
her abductors were friendly. The male entities took off her clothes and
examined her while the female entities looked on passively.
These events seem to be a series of messages right out of Sara’s own
unconscious, which sought to tell her that her lifestyle was unsatisfactory and
that she would not find fulfillment until she could break away from Jan and
enter into normal social and sexual relationships with men. The whole
abduction seems to be a veiled rape fantasy, which left Sara with a curious
sense of happiness and satisfaction—as though she had learned something very
important from it.
It appears that Sara’s UFO abduction occurred during a time of great conflict
in her life. She and Jan moved from the Canyons shortly after the incident, and
Sara gradually drew away from Jan and went out on her own. She eventually
lost contact with her former roommate, who subsequently developed cancer—
during the same time Sara was becoming inexplicably obsessed with medicine
and cancer cures!
To put all of this a little more simply, Sara’s UFO abduction experience
reads surprisingly like a dream she might have had at that time, in which her
own unconscious thoughts and conflicts were presented to her by some element
of her own mind. The scenario also showed Sara how she could resolve this
conflict, which is also a very common aspect of normal dreaming. Yet, on the
other hand, there can be no denying that Sara underwent a genuine UFO
experience. Although Jan could not remember any details of the abduction
during repeated attempts to regress her, she did recall—with frightening
vividness—the events which led to her blackout, including the intense pain she
felt around her head when she found herself paralyzed after that mysterious
light first appeared through the window.
My investigation of the Sara Shaw case led me to totally reject the idea that
UFO abductions are orchestrated by beings from another world. Instead I began
to toy with the notion that we ourselves have somehow created the UFO
mystery and are unleashing it onto the world in vivid reality. My other idea was
that perhaps some “X” intelligence exists in the universe which is symbiotically
linked to life on this planet and to our minds, and which is sending the UFO
phenomenon to us. I went on to theorize that UFO abductions are not random
events but occur to very special people at very special moments in their lives.
I speculated that a person who is harboring a strong unconscious conflict,
which cannot be internally resolved actually invites a UFO abduction
experience. Somehow his or her concerns and mental anguish might act as a
beacon that attracts the UFO experience. The intelligence behind the UFO
mystery (whatever it might be) may then create a UFO encounter for the
witness by modeling it upon those very conflicts. A UFO abduction might
therefore be a dramatized encapsulation of the witness’s own mental concerns.
The goal of the “abduction” would be to bring the conflict to conscious
attention.
You might say that according to this theory a UFO abduction is a sort of
symbolic dream that has been extracted from the witness’s mind and made real
by the UFO intelligence.
Now having developed this theory, I began looking for ways to document it.
One way would be to study the experience of other UFO abductees and delve
into their private lives in order to see what sort of connection might exist
between the abduction and the victim’s state of mind at the time. This was my
next project, and it wasn’t hard to find evidence that supported my views. I
soon found that many UFO abductees undergo their experiences at times of
emotional crisis
Take the much-publicized case of Betty Andreasson, for example. This
abduction took place on the night of January 25, 1967. The scene was a rural
home in Massachusettes where Mrs. Betty Andreasson lived with her seven
children. Mrs. Andreasson’s husband had been recently injured in an
automobile accident and was still recuperating in the hospital. Her chief support
during these trying times was her oldest daughter Becky, who was helping take
care of the other children. Mrs. Andreasson’s father, Waino Aho, was present in
the house that night as well.
Most of the Andreassons were watching television as the abduction
gradually unfolded The first intimation that something unusual was about to
take place came when the lights in the house began to flicker and everything
became weirdly silent outside. The electricity finally went out completely and
an eerie pink light began shining through a kitchen window. Mr. Aho was the
first to look outside. What he saw shocked him.
He later told investigators that he had seen small alien creatures “wearing
headdresses” hopping across the backyard. He described them as looking like
“Halloween freaks.” Before Mr. Aho could see more, though, he—along with
the rest of the family—entered into a state of suspended animation. They
awoke, later, only to discover that a considerable time had elapsed.
During the next several months both Becky and Betty Andreasson slowly
began to recall more details about their experience and came to the conclusion
that there was more to their encounter than met the eye. Becky dimly recalled
that she had slipped out of a trance at one moment during her time-lapse and
had seen the aliens in the house with her family. What she had seen matched
the description her grandfather had given of the aliens
Betty Andreasson finally started contacting UFOlogists throughout the
country and eventually Raymond Fowler, a seasoned and careful investigator
from Massachusettes, had her hypnotically regressed. This was in 1977. It was
only at that time that the two witnesses fully remembered what had happened
during their time lapse.
Betty recalled how the aliens entered her house by materializing through a
closed door. She described them as short, hairless, and gray. They had large
heads, slanted huge eyes, and slit-like mouths. Her first response to their
presence was to ask them if they wanted some food. The aliens took their
victim outside and floated her to their UFO, where she underwent a series of
physical and spiritual adventures.
She was first taken to a bubble-shaped room, but was then escorted to
another chamber and placed on a platform where she was bathed in a white
“cleansing” light. After undergoing a medical examination, which included
having a needle thrust into her abdomen (just like Betty Hill reported in 1961),
she was taken to an alien realm where she was subjected to more unusual
experiences.
First she was placed in a tube which was filled with liquid, after which she
was guided down a dark tunnel to another location where she was confronted
by a dazzling light so intense that she thought she was going to be incinerated.
The light transformed into a vision of a Phoenix being consumed and reborn as
a worm. The aliens told her that she would forget what she had seen, and she
was then returned to her home.
The case of Betty Andreasson is extremely evidential, since unlike so many
other abductions, there was more than one witness to the incident. Before his
death, Mr. Aho often talked about seeing the aliens; Becky, too, was able to
recall the moment when she slipped out of her suspended animation.
My main interest in this case concerns the nature of the odd visionary
experiences to which Mrs. Andreasson was subjected during her kidnapping ,
which seem to relate to her intense religious beliefs. She is a deeply religious
Christian who originally believed that her abduction had nothing to do with
beings from outer space, but was actually some form of angelic visitation. I can
sympathize with this viewpoint, since her experience aboard the UFO was
filled with overt religious symbolism. In fact, Andreasson has become even
more religious as a result of her experience.
All this leads me to suspect that her abduction was somehow prompted by a
spiritual crisis she was probably undergoing at the time. Her husband was in a
“touch and go” situation at the hospital, which had saddled her with enormous
household was well as emotional responsibilities. Both her financial and
emotional future were totally up in the air. Many people, especially those who
harbor deep religious convictions, are prone to question their beliefs and world
views in the face of such psychologically mortifying experiences. (The
unexpected death of a close relative can even turn one against religion if the
death seems meaningless.)
And what of the abduction itself? Just look at all the symbolism it contains.
One of the central themes of Christianity is the concept of spiritual death and
rebirth, which is epitomized in the ritual of baptism. This same basic concept is
also part of ancient alchemical and masonic traditions as exemplified in the
“initiation by fire and water,” through which one must triumph in order to earn
spiritual perfection. Note that these are the same themes that crop up in Mrs.
Andreasson’s story.
She is placed in a tube which is filled with water, is-then “reborn” as she is
guided down a dark tunnel, and is next purified by a glowing light which
consumes her. She then witnesses the similar immolation and rebirth of the
legendary Phoenix, which is also an ancient symbol of spiritual transformation
and rebirth. The whole abduction strikes me as an allegorical journey whose
purpose was to help Mrs. Andreasson reconfirm her own Christian faith.
It also seems to me that the aliens even told Mrs. Andreasson that they had
come to offer her spiritual enlightenment. This message is contained in an
interchange which Mrs. Andreasson recalled at the beginning of her experience,
which few of her investigators have ever been able to explain.
When the aliens first appeared in her home, Mrs. Andreasson’s initial
reaction was to offer to cook them some food. The aliens replied that they could
only eat burnt food, and thus made a cryptic allusion to the “burnt offerings”
mentioned in the Bible. Mrs. Andreasson began to prepare some meat for her
visitors, but the aliens told her that they didn’t eat that kind of food…that their
food was “knowledge tried by fire” and asked if she had any such nourishment
available. Mrs. Andreasson caught the drift of what she was being told and
fetched a Bible for her visitors. The aliens, in turn, gave her a small book in
exchange for the Bible.
Now for what purpose would aliens from another solar system engage in
such a meaningless, if not ridiculous, conversation? This episode can only be
explained on the theory that the UFOnauts had come specifically to offer Mrs.
Andreasson a spiritual revelation and were trying to make this known to her in
the best way they could. It therefore seems obvious, at least to me, that the
whole abduction experience was triggered by Mrs. Andreasson’s own religious
conflicts which were somehow transformed and dramatized into a very real (or
surreal) UFO encounter.
The Andreasson affair indicates that a UFO abduction can be triggered by a
specific event in the victim’s life. In this case it was the trauma the witness was
suffering due to the crisis engendered by her husband’s accident. Yet these
trigger events do not have to be that overt. Sometimes they can be subtle events
that ignite only unconscious conflicts in the witness’s mind. This may seem
odd, but anyone who has studied psychiatry will be well aware that at times
even seemingly inconsequential events in someone’s life can have long lasting
and far reaching effects. It is just such a subtle conflict which I believe resulted
in Carl Higdon’s 1974 Wyoming abduction
The Higdon case first hit the presses on October 29, 1974, when the
Rawlings (Wyoming) Daily Times published an account of his ordeal. Dr. R.
Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist and UFOlogist then at the University of
Wyoming, traveled to Rawlings a few days later to look into the matter. Dr.
Sprinkle subsequently wrote a lengthy report on his findings, which he passed
on to APRO (the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization) in Tucson,
Arizona.
Although Higdon consciously remembered much of his experience, Sprinkle
conducted two hypnotic sessions with him in order to help fill out the details of
the abduction. Here’s the story as it was finally pieced together:
Higdon went hunting in the Medicine Bow National Forest on October 25th.
This preserve is some 49 miles south of Rawlings. At about 4:00 P.M., Higdon
spotted a small herd of elk and fired at it. However, the rifle bullet traveled only
about fifty feet and then fell to the ground. An eerie silence fell over the forest
at about this time. Higdon retrieved the bullet and was about to go on his way
when he was disturbed by the sound of a twig breaking behind him.
He turned around to see a rather strange looking man wearing a black outfit.
The man was rather tall and his hair stood on end. The “man” gave Higdon
some pills to take (which he did without question) and asked him to follow
along. Then the alien pointed some sort of implement at Higdon, who next
found himself inside a cubicle. He was sitting in a chair with a helmet on his
head, and the alien was there with him. Levers on the cubicle’s console began
to move upon command, and the craft took off and shot away to some distant
location where it landed.
Now the next phase of the abduction began. Higdon left the cubicle and
found himself next to a high tower. A group of people, consisting of a middle-
aged man and four children about the ages of 11-17, were talking nearby but
paid no attention to their visitor. The alien took Higdon up the tower, where he
was briefly examined, and then told that he “wasn’t what they needed.” He was
then taken back to the cubicle and returned to Earth.
Higdon’s next recollections were confused. He found himself back in the
forest, but he was completely disoriented. He was eventually discovered
wandering around aimlessly by a passing motorist and ended up that night in a
local hospital. He was in such a confused state that he didn’t even recognize his
wife when rescuers found him. His truck was discovered later that day, but it
had mysteriously found its way into an area of the forest inaccessible by road.
Higdon also still had the flattened bullet he had retrieved before his abduction.
The Higdon case was published by Coral and Jim Lorenzen of APRO in
1977 as part of their book Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer
Space. However, it wasn’t until 1979 that Dr. Sprinkle, (who is a supporter of
the extraterrestrial hypothesis) was able to issue his full 133-page report as part
of the anthology, UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (compiled and
edited by Richard Haines).
What trauma could have produced this bizarre abduction? This was the
question I asked myself as I read over Sprinkle’s account in hopes of finding
added support for my theory. The clue finally came halfway through the report.
It was a clue that even Higdon seemed to appreciate.
During the course of their conversations together, Higdon himself brought
up the fact that some years prior to his abduction he had undergone a
vasectomy. He openly questioned whether this operation had something to do
with his experience and the ultimate rejection by the aliens. “I had a
vasectomy,” he told Sprinkle, “and I was wondering if that was the reason that I
wasn’t any good.” This remark not only indicates that Higdon somehow related
his vasectomy to the abduction, but was harboring half-conscious conflicts
about the operation. Notice that he degrades himself with the remark that he
“wasn’t any good”—which is a far cry from what the aliens reportedly said
when they explained he “wasn’t what they needed.” This odd, self-demeaning
reference is very significant. Had it been made during a therapeutic session
with a psychiatrist, for instance, instead of during a UFO investigation, I am
sure any competent clinician would have eagerly explored the significance of
the remark. For some reason Higdon considered himself “no good” because of
his vasectomy, and was projecting his feelings onto the aliens. Now you may
think I’m reaching with this one, but I’m really not.
Few people realize just how unconsciously traumatic vasectomies can be to
men in this culture. Although a routine operation, many men, although
undergoing the procedure willingly, are often emotionally scarred by this self-
perceived assault on their sexuality. Such men can suffer the same type of
psychological reaction that some women undergo after having a hyster ectomy.
Some men even perceive a vasectomy as a form of castration—an act which
robs them of their sexuality. This is why many men irrationally resist the
operation, even though it in no way impairs sexual functioning. Other men
sometimes experience depression or anxiety when they realize that they can no
longer engender children.
It is perfectly logical to assume that Carl Higdon may have been harboring
fears and concerns of this very nature. They even seem to be dramatized in his
abduction story. The experience began when Higdon shot a bullet at an elk, but
found that it had lost its potency, when it traveled a mere 50 feet and fell to the
ground. The overt sexual symbolism of the ineffective bullet needn’t be
belabored. Then he was abducted to a tower where he was shown a family
composed of middle-aged man, such as himself, and four children. This is quite
interesting, since Higdon himself had four children aged 11-15 at the time. He
was then examined and told that he wasn’t what the aliens needed. The
symbolism here strikes me as rather obvious. Higdon is shown a symbolic
representation of his own family and is then rather forcefully though cryptically
reminded that he is not needed. The aliens then returned Higdon where they
found him.
The whole abduction seems to be a dramatization of Higdon’s own fears that
he had become worthless because of his vasectomy, which had robbed him of
his masculinity as symbolized in his inability to further expand his family. Note
too that, just as in the Hill, Shaw, and Andreasson cases, the whole surrealistic
scenario very much resembles a dream Higdon might have had as a result of his
conflict—complete with symbols, sexual references, and space-time
discontinuities.
It is my own belief that probably all UFO abductions contain hidden
meanings and symbols which directly relate to conflicts buried in the minds of
the victims. Unfortunately, trying to understand the secret language of UFO
abduction reports is no easy matter. Very few published reports provide the type
of personal information that the psychologically-oriented investigator would
need to know in order to uncover the cause of the event. The witness’s
credibility is ascertained and maybe a psychiatrist will have been brought in to
make sure he or she isn’t crazy, but we learn very little about the inner lives of
these very special people. In some cases it might take a detailed and lengthy
psychoanalytical exploration of the witness before we could get at the heart of
an abduction experience.
I don’t think, however, that it takes a trained psychiatrist to see how the
experiences of such people as Betty Hill, Sara Shaw, Betty Andreasson, and
Carl Higdon are directly related to conflicts that had disrupted their lives at the
time of their abductions. The relationship between their inner conflicts and the
nature of their UFO abductions are rather blatant. The fact that sexual and
spiritual conflicts often seem to be the overriding theme of UFO abductions—
just as they are in normal dreams—is also extremely noteworthy, as well as
predictable.
I don’t mean to imply, however, that people who experience UFO
abductions have merely experienced imaginary encounters. I don’t think that
UFO abductions can be explained away as vivid dreams, visions or
hallucinations. There can be no doubt, in my view, that the UFO phenomenon
is as much a technological mystery as it is a paraphysical one. Sara Shaw, Betty
and Barney Hill, Betty Andreasson, and Carl Higdon probably were abducted
by humanoid aliens. What I don’t believe, however, is that these beings were
from outer space. Somehow they are created out of our imaginations, or are
somehow linked to life on this planet. They come forth and interact with us
when we unconsciously need them and beckon them.
—D. SCOTT ROGO
References
Barry, Bill. Ultimate Encounter (Pocket Books, 1978).
Clark, Jerome, and Coleman, Loren. The Unidentified: Notes Toward Solving the UFO Mystery (Warner,
1975).
Druffel, Ann, and Rogo, D. Scott. The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (Prentice-Hall, 1980).
Fontana, David. The Secret Language of Symbols (Chronicle Books, 1993).
Fromm, Erich. The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales,
and Myths (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951).
Fuller, John. The Interrupted Journey (Dial Press, 1966).
Haines, Richard, ed. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (Scarecrow Press, 1979).
Halpern, James and Ilsa. Projections (Seaview/Putnam, 1983).
Lorenzen, Corl and Jim. Abducted! Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space (Berkley Books, 1977).
Rogo, Scott, ed. Alien Abductions: True Cases of UFO Kidnappings (Signet/NAL, 1980).
Rogo, D. Scott, and Clark, Jerome. Earth’s Secret Inhabitants (Temp Books, 1979).
Walton, Travis. The Walton Experience (Berkley Books, 1978).
Rosedale (Victoria, Australia) close encounter One of the best physical

trace UFO landing cases in Australia, occurred near Rosedale, Victoria, on
September, 30, 1980. It is a striking event because of the wide array of physical
effects involved and the credibility of the primary witness.
A property caretaker was awakened in the early hours of the morning by
stock disturbances and other strange sounds. Upon investigating he observed,
initially only some 200 metres away, an aerial object, approximately 8 metres
wide and 5 metres high, moving over the property, at about a height of 2
metres. The object appeared to have orange and blue lights on it, and was
domed shaped with a white top.
It travelled slowly towards a 10,000-gallon concrete water tank. Upon
reaching the tank, the UFO appeared to hover directly on top of it for about a
minute. The object then landed about 15 metres away from the tank. Within
about 5 minutes the caretaker had ridden a motorbike down to within 10 to 15
metres of the object on the ground. It appeared to stay on the ground for a
further 2 to 3 minutes, until the persistent noise increased to “an awful scream.”
The object then rose up, tilting so the witness could then see its bottom
sections. The caretaker was hit with a blast of hot air. Debris consisting of
stones, weed and cow dung fell away from the object. It then titled back into a
horizon position and slowly moved off into the distance, at a steady altitude of
about 3 metres.
A circular physical ground trace, shaped like an annulus and just 10 metres
in diameter, was left behind. Physical and chemical differences were found in
soil samples taken at the site by the writer, but no explanation could be
determined. The water tank was found to be largely empty of water, despite
being verified as full a few days earlier. A small cone shape of silt was evident
in the centre of the near empty tank. There were effects on the witness
(including headaches and nausea) and his watch (which for 3 days after the
incident stopped working every time he put it on). There were also possible
independent witnesses of the UFO. A girl on a nearby property may have
observed the object approaching the primary witness’ property. A delivery van
driver was reported to have seen the UFO on the ground, apparently while the
main witness was inside his house preparing to go down the paddock.
The incident was initially investigated by the Victorian UFO Research
Society. The striking nature of the event drew this writer (physical-trace
specialist, Bill Chalker) and physical chemist Keith Basterfield to the site. Both
of us were impressed with the credibility of the witness and the compelling
consistency of the physical evidence.
No prosaic explanation could be determined. A “plasma vortex”(a
controversial hypothesis to explain “crop circles”) was one of a number of
explanations put forward. The evidence does not support this idea. The 1980
Rosedale UFO landing is a very striking example of a CE-2 physical trace
event.
Roswell Incident, The (Grosset and Dunlap, 1980). Charles Berlitz and
William Moore produced the second book, after Frank Scully’s in 1950, to allege
a crashed spacecraft and alien bodies were retrieved by the U.S. military in New
Mexico during the 1940s and kept in storage at an Air Force base. Their version
relied on the eyewitness testimony of Major Jesse Marcel who investigated a
debris field he could not identify on a ranch outside Roswell. Marcel never
claimed to have seen alien bodies, so Berlitz and Moore only “postulate a
tentative picture of the sequence of events” to support that prospect.
Roswell (New Mexico) incident Just two weeks after the famous Kenneth
Arnold sighting (of June 24, 1947), which ushered in the modern “flying
saucer” era, headlines such as “Flying Disk Captured by Air Force” and
“RAAF Captures Flying Saucer” were splashed across the front pages of
newspapers across the United States. The front-page story read in part:
“The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday
when the intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force,
Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc
through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office of
Chaves County.
“The flying object landed on a ranch near Roswell sometime last week. Not
having phone facilities, the rancher stored the disc until such time as he was
able to contact the sheriff’s office, who in turn notified Major Jesse A. Marcel
of the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office.
“Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s
home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned
by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.” By the next day, the “flying saucer”
no longer existed. It became, instead, a crashed weather balloon. Not until three
decades later would the case be reopened by persistent UFOlogists, who
eventually pressured the U.S. government into reopening the case themselves.
Reconstruction of Roswell alien from alleged eyewitness data supplied to forensic artist William
Louis McDonald
On July 8, 1947, the commander of the base at Roswell, then Colonel

William Blanchard, ordered his public relations officer to announce they had
found a flying saucer. Within hours, however, Eighth Air Force Headquarters
announced that the debris had been identified as the remains of a common
weather balloon and a Rawin radar reflector.
The case took on new life in 1978 when Jesse Marcel, Sr., a former air
intelligence officer at the Roswell base, told UFO researchers (Stanton
Friedman and Leonard Stringfield) that he had picked up pieces of a flying
saucer. Marcel provided the location but not the date. He also said that the
object was something not of this Earth.
Composite of the Roswell spacecraft as conceptualized by forensic artist William Louis

McDonald
Although the wreckage was officially identified by Army Air Force officers
in Fort Worth, Texas, as a weather balloon, interviews conducted with
participants thirty and forty years after the event told a different story.
Eyewitnesses, including William Woody and E.L. Pyles claimed to have seen
the object in the sky over Roswell, descending toward the ground.
W.W. (“Mac”) Brazel, a rancher living in the Corona area of New Mexico,
found a field strewn with metallic debris. According to his son, Bill Brazel,
Mac wanted to know who was going to clean up the mess. He thought the
Army might be responsible and traveled to Roswell to alert both the sheriff and
the military.
Those who handled the debris such as Bill Brazel, Jesse Marcel, Sr., Brazel’s
neighbors (Floyd and Loretta Proctor), and others suggested the material was
lightweight and extraordinarily tough. Brazel, the Proctors, and Marcel all
experimented with the debris at separate times by trying to burn it, but it failed
to ignite. Bill Brazel said the material was as light as balsa wood, but so strong
it wouldn’t break. It was also impervious to his pocket knife. Brazel and others
also said there were pieces of material that looked like aluminum foil, but when
crumpled into a ball would unfold itself, returning to its original shape without
any signs of a fold or wrinkle.
Marcel and counterintelligence agent, Sheridan Cavitt, followed Brazel to
his ranch. Marcel later told researchers that the debris was scattered over a field
in a strip several hundred feet wide and about three quarters of a mile long.
Though not mentioned by Marcel, Brazel told investigators that the land had
been gouged out in a strip about five hundred feet long. He said it took about
two years for the area to grass back over.
The crashed spacecraft recovered by military personnel as interpreted by forensic artist William
Louis McDonald
Other participants, including Colonel Thomas J. DuBose, Chief of Staff at

the Eighth Air Force, told later investigators that the balloon explanation was
just a cover story for the real find. DuBose said he had not seen the real debris
himself but had been present when some of it had arrived at the Fort Worth
Army Air Field on its way to Washington, D.C.
Others, such as Roswell adjutant Patrick Saunders and Roswell provost
marshal Edwin Easley, said they couldn’t talk about the case previously
because they had been sworn to secrecy. Still others claimed to have witnessed
alien bodies associated with the crash.
Such statements—coupled with the fact that the original debris had to be
flown immediately to Wright-Patterson AFB, in Ohio—suggest that something
stranger and more important than a weather balloon had crashed on Brazel’s
ranch.
In 1994, the U.S. Air Force, after conducting their own investigation,
claimed the case was explained by a weather balloon with a radar target. This
time, however, they claimed it came from New York University’s constant level
balloon research project known as Mogul. They implied that the balloons and
targets were something special and highly classified. While it is true that the
project was classified, the equipment consists of commercial off-the-shelf
balloons and reflectors, which should have been easily recognizable as such by
the military personnel who first surveyed the wreckage.
In 1997, the Air Force released another “final report” on Roswell. In this one
they explained the alleged alien bodies as anthropomorphic crash dummies
used in the testing of aircraft ejection systems and parachutes.
Almost no one accepted this explanation because these tests hadn’t started
until 1953—six years after the Roswell crash. The Air Force seemed to be
suggesting they believed those who said they had seen alien bodies recovered
in 1947, which would indeed require an explanation.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
ANOTHER VIEW: Nothing dominated the thoughts and provoked the fears of
American military planners in 1947 more than the prospect of the Soviet Union
exploding an atomic bomb and possessing a nuclear battlefield capability. To
provide an early warning system that could detect Soviet nuclear tests, a spying
project was authorized in 1946, and given a nearly unlimited budget, to develop
an upper atmospheric surveillance device that would acoustically sense
reverberations from atomic explosions on the other side of the world. If the
Soviets learned that the U.S. had such an atmospheric spy system, they might
shift their nuclear weapons tests underground, so the highest possible levels of
secrecy would have to cloak Project Mogul, as it was code named. Mogul’s top
secret classification became Priority 1A, comparable to the Manhattan Project
which less than two years earlier had produced the world’s first atomic bomb.
Only a few key high-ranking military officers with a strict “need-to-know”
would be aware of Mogul’s existence.
Equipment used in Project Mogul resembled nothing that had ever been
launched in the history of flight. It consisted of a gigantic train of 15-foot
diameter meteorological balloons, 23 balloons in all, stretching 650 feet into
the air. This balloon train carried aloft three radar reflectors, resembling large
metal-foil kites, called RAWIN targets; low-frequency acoustic microphones;
metal boxes packed with batteries for the acoustic devices; sonobuoys attached
to three and four-inch diameter aluminum rings; tubes holding ballast; and
altitude pressure switches. Because a New York novelty company had
manufactured the radar reflectors, reinforcing tape used to hold it together had
a stylized, flower-like lavender design on it.
Mogul Flight 4 was launched by a team of scientists on June 4, 1947, from
Alamogordo Army Air Field, located to the southwest of Roswell. It ascended
into the stratosphere while traveling northeast, shifted in the face of prevailing
winds toward the northwest, then as some of the balloons burst from exposure
to the sun, it descended back to Earth heading northeast again. Once the signal
batteries depleted the power, ground contact with the balloons was lost at a
point near Arabela, New Mexico, about 17 miles from where the balloon train
eventu ally came to rest on the J.B. Foster ranch. As lower portions of the train,
with equipment attached, scraped along the field, balloons still aloft dragged
everything through prickly desert brush, snagging pieces of balloon, radar
targets, and other equipment along the ground at a southwest-to-northeast
angle.
Ten days later, ranch foreman Mac Brazel was inspecting his sheep herd by
horseback when he spotted this line of debris about seven miles from the ranch
house. Brazel would later explain that at the time he “did not pay much
attention” to what he described as “bright wreckage made up of rubber strips,
tin foil, a rather tough paper and sticks.” He was in a hurry to make his rounds
of the ranch and finish chores before dark. Besides, twice before he had four
weather balloon remnants on the ranch. Maybe this was more of the same.
Another ten days passed and civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold had an encounter
that would be the defining experience of a cultural phenomenon. While flying
in western Washington State on June 24th, he saw nine shiny objects over the
Cascade Mountains, moving “like a saucer would if you skipped it across the
water.” In subsequent news media accounts the term “flying saucer” was born.
Over the next two weeks sightings of unidentified flying objects were reported
in 39 states, igniting widespread, excited speculation about whether it was
space aliens or Soviet communists who had invaded our skies.
On a visit to Corona, the closest town to the ranch, Brazel heard
conversation from relatives about these flying disk reports and rumors of a
reward to whoever captured a disk. He began to wonder if what he had found
might be wreckage from one of the mysterious craft, since there seemed to be
much more debris and of a wider variety this time than he had seen left by the
two previous balloons. On July 4, Brazel returned to the debris field
accompanied by his wife and their 14-year-old daughter, Bessie, and together
they filled several gunny sacks. Bessie would describe years later what they
found: “The debris looked like pieces of large balloon which had burst.” She
picked up foil-like material, some which had kite sticks attached with two-inch
wide tape. On the tape we “flower-like designs in a variety of pastel colors.”
Needing to buy a new pickup truck, Brazel drove 75 miles into Roswell on
July 6, carrying along several pieces of the debris. “He certainly wouldn’t have
made the trip just on account of the stuff he had found,” his son Bill Brazel
remembers. Once in town Mac Brazel stopped by the office of Sheriff George
Wilcox and showed him the pieces. Thinking it might have military
significance, Wilcox phoned Roswell Army Air Field and was referred to an
intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, who he interrupted while eating lunch.
Marcel contacted his base commander, Colonel William Blanchard. “In my
discussion with the colonel, we determined that a downed aircraft of some
unusual sort might be involved,” Marcel later recounted. Col. Blanchard
ordered Marcel and a counterintelligence officer, Captain Sheridan Cavitt, to
follow Brazel back to the ranch and investigate. They arrived after dark and
camped out. The next morning they viewed the debris field.
Though Cavitt claims he immediately knew the material was from a weather
balloon, Marcel remained unconvinced. There was simply too much debris, and
it looked too unusual, to have come from any known weather balloon. Brazel
described the debris field for reporters a few days later as being about 200
yards in diameter, while Cavitt would remember it four decades later as only
about 20 feet square. By contrast, Marcel told me in an interview in 1979 that
the debris had been scattered a distance of one mile and measured hundreds of
feet across. These vast discrepancies in the various accounts, and Marcel’s
disturbing tendency toward exaggeration, would prove to be a recurring pattern
in events surrounding the Roswell incident.
With Marcel’s Buick and Cavitt’s jeep crammed with wreckage, both men
drove back into Roswell, not arriving until late at night. Marcel drove straight
home and awakened his wife and their eleven-year-old son, Jesse Jr., who
remembers his father being excited and “saying something about flying
saucers.” Major Marcel spread some debris out on the kitchen floor and pointed
to a foot-long balsa-like beam with violet images on it, marveling at how the
indecipherable symbols might be an alien language. “Dad brought home a
quantity of black, brittle plastic material that had either melted or burned, and a
lot of metal foil. Some people say they tried to tear it or fold it up and it would
unfold on its own. I didn’t see that.” The material resembling plastic were
pieces of neoprene balloon which had degraded in the sunlight. After 15
minutes of show-and-tell with his family, Marcel bundled the debris up and
drove it to the air base.
Though no record exists of Marcel’s meeting with Colonel Blanchard, it
seems reasonable to assume that at first both men might have thought the
wreckage could be from a Soviet surveillance device sent to spy on American
nuclear installations, especially the Roswell home base for B-29s used to carry
atomic bombs. That might have prompted Blanchard to suggest using flying
disks as a convenient cover story to buy time while superiors in Washington,
D.C. and Wright Field in Ohio were analyzing the debris. It may also be that
Marcel had become so convinced the debris “was out of this world” that he
either persuaded Blanchard of that prospect, or he took the rash step of
releasing information about the finding without proper authorization. What we
do know, however, is that on the morning of July 8, the same day that Colonel
Blanchard took a scheduled leave of absence, the base’s public information
officer, Walter Haut, distributed a press release announcing the acquisition of a
flying disk.
That afternoon’s Roswell Daily Record front page story began: “The
intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field
announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying
saucer. According to information released by the department, over authority of
Maj. J.A. Marcel, intelligence officer, the disk was recovered....” Nowhere in
the press release was Col. Blanchard’s name mentioned, only Marcel’s.
Blanchard either did not want to be associated with the most important
discovery in human history, giving all credit to a subordinate, Jesse Marcel, or
he wanted to distance himself from what he feared might turn out to be a public
embarrassment.
In a 1979 interview Marcel accused Walter Haut of having written the press
release without authorization, an act for which “he was severely reprimanded”
by superiors. Soon after the incident Haut reportedly resigned from the Air
Force “for personal reasons.” Haut would confess in 1995 about the press
release that “I cannot honestly remember whether I wrote it. How the colonel
passed that information on to me I cannot honestly tell you. It was not that big a
production at that time, in my mind.” So unaffected was Haut that his wife
claims he never once mentioned a flying disk or the press release to her. News
of this puzzling find shot up the Army Air Force chain of command, in many
instances arriving through official channels after the military brass had heard
reports of it on news broadcasts, which did not make them happy. On July 9,
for instance, The Washington Post reported: “Officers at the Roswell, N.M. air
base received a blistering rebuke from the Army A.F. Headquarters in
Washington for announcing that a ‘flying disc’ had been found on a New
Mexico ranch.” Eighth Army Air Force commander Brigadier Gen. Roger
Ramey ordered Major Marcel to fly the debris to Fort Worth, Texas and present
it before a press conference he had called to squelch the firestorm of media
attention. In numerous interviews from 1978 until his death in 1986, Marcel
maintained “there was half a B-29 full” of the crash debris o Fort Worth. Other
officers on that flight have strenuously challenged this claim as a gross
exaggeration. Robert R. Porter, the flight engineer of the B-29 flight carrying
Marcel, filed an affidavit in 1991 describing the debris as being carried in three
shoebox-sized packages and a triangle-shaped package, “all of which could
have fit into the trunk of a car.”
Once inside Gen. Ramey’s office the debris was laid out on the floor and
inspected by a weather officer Ramey had called in, Warrant Officer Irving
Newton. “I remember Major Marcel chased me all around that room,” Newton
told investigators during the 1990s. “He kept saying things like, ‘look at how
tough the metal is. Look at the strange markings on it.’ While I was examining
the debris, Marcel was picking up pieces of the radar target sticks and trying to
convince me that some notations on the sticks were alien writings. But I was
adamant that it was a weather balloon with a RAWIN target. I think he was
embarrassed as crazy and he would like to do anything to make that turn into a
flying saucer.”
Two news photos were taken of a sheepish-looking Marcel holding pieces of
the weather balloon. At least three more shots were snapped of Gen. Ramey,
dressed in his formal uniform, and his assistant, Col. Thomas DuBose, posing
by similar pieces. Marcel would claim in 1979 that debris from an ordinary
weather balloon had been substituted for the flying saucer wreckage in all the
photos but one, which showed him “with pieces of the actual stuff we had
found. It was not a staged photo. Later, they cleared out our wreckage and
substituted some of their own. Then they allowed more photos. Those photos
were taken while the actual wreckage was already on its way to Wright Field.”
To test Marcel’s allegation, researchers have obtained original prints of the
photos and conducted comparisons of the debris pictured in each. No
differences were found because the debris is identical. Nor would there have
been any reason to believe Gen. Ramey just happened to have remnants of a
degraded weather balloon laying around to produce for the media in case a
flying saucer cover story ever became necessary.
An FBI teletype message on July 8, sent from the Dallas office to FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, D.C., and released to UFO
researchers in the 1970s, reads: “Major Curtan, Headquarters, Eighth Air Force
telephonically advised this office that an object purporting to be a flying disc
was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, this date. The disc is hexagonal in
shape and was suspended from a balloon by cable, which was approximately
twenty feet in diameter. Major Curtan further advised that the object found
resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that
telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not
(illegible) borne out this belief. Disc and balloon being transported to Wright
Field by special plane for examination.”
Once at Wright Field parts of the debris were quickly identified by Colonel
Marcellus Duffy, a former project officer of Mogul, as being from a Mogul
balloon flight. A similar identification was made at Andrews Army Air Field
outside Washington, D.C., at the headquarters of the Army Air Forces Weather
Service, which was located in the same building as the office of Major General
Clements McMullen, Deputy Commander of Strategic Air Command, who had
originally ordered Gen. Ramey to concoct a cover story to protect Project
Mogul. No one at Roswell, and few at Wright Field, had a need-to-know access
concerning Mogul, which meant that many high-ranking officers and their
subordinates were left to speculate about what had happened and why it was
cloaked in secrecy. Both Col. Blanchard and Gen. Ramey were probably
uninformed about Mogul and the true significance of the crash debris. It could
even be that top levels of the military wanted rumors of crashed saucers to
spread as confusion for Soviet operatives known to be probing for American
nuclear secrets.
In 1994 the Secretary of the Air Force ordered an investigation of
allegations that a conspiracy existed within the government to hide the crash of
an alien spacecraft near Roswell. The officer placed in charge, Col. Richard
Weaver, Director of Security and Special Program Oversight for the Secretary’s
office, held the highest security clearance, as did the members of his staff,
enabling them to examine all super-secret “black” programs that are kept from
public scrutiny. Their search of records for references to Roswell, flying saucer
debris, and alien bodies turned up nothing. “The morning reports (at the
Roswell base) showed that the subsequent activities at Roswell during the
month were mostly mundane and not indicative of any unusual high level ac
tivity,” their report concluded. Nor was any indication found “of heightened
activity anywhere else in the military hierarchy in July 1947. If some event
happened that was one of the ‘watershed happenings’ in human history, the
U.S. military certainly reacted in an unconcerned and cavalier manner.”
A similar investigation was conducted by the U.S. General Accounting
Office using employees holding high security clearances. Army
Counterintelligence Corps historical files 1947-49, and National Security
Council meeting minutes for 1947-48 were reviewed and no mention of
Roswell or a crash was found. All CIA databases were searched against the
term Roswell and no documents relating to a crash or bodies were uncovered.
Also, records of Air Materiel Command at Wright Field from 1947 to 1950
were reviewed and GAO “found no records mentioning the Roswell crash or
the examination by Air Materiel Command personnel of any debris recovered
from the crash.”
A series of declassified military documents from 1947 and 1948, all once
classified Secret, reveal that not only did the Air Force have no pieces of an
extraterrestrial vehicle, it was an agency increasingly frustrated at being unable
to find physical evidence for the reality of flying saucers. Among these
documents:
Sept. 23, 1947— A letter by Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining at Wright Field
bemoaning “the lack of physical evidence in the shape of crash recovered
exhibits...”
Dec. 22, 1947—An analysis of UFO reports by Maj. Gen. George

McDonald, Director of Air Force Intelligence, declaring “physical
evidence, such as crash-recovered exhibits, is not available...”
Nov. 8, 1948—A letter by Col. H.M. McCoy, chief of intelligence at Wright

Field’s Air Materiel Command, concluding “the exact nature of those
objects cannot be established until physical evidence, such as that which
would result from a crash, has been obtained.”
Commercial airline pilot Kent Jeffrey spent several years financing his own
personal investigation of Roswell and whether any wreckage or bodies ended
up in storage at Wright Field, later called Wright-Patterson. He tracked down
and interviewed three retired Air Force colonels who served at Wright-
Patterson in the 1950s and 1960s with the Foreign Technology Division, which
would have handled any crash debris if it existed. None of the three knew
anything about UFO debris or alien bodies. “If something like that had
happened, I would have known about it,” declared George Weinbrenner, the
commander of the Foreign Technology Division from 1968-74. For Jeffrey
these three sources provided him with “the final confirmation—no alien bodies,
no secret hangar, and no UFO crash at Roswell. Case closed.”
A combination of human foibles coalesced to create the modern myth of
what happened near Roswell, including a contagion of rumormongering,
miscommunication, misperception, exaggerations, self-aggrandizing behavior,
lies for financial gain, and a psychological condition called false memories.
There has been a tendency for second and thirdhand witnesses to pass on rumor
and speculation, a case in point being retired Gen. Arthur Exon, who was a
lieutenant colonel at Wright Field in 1947. Exon told Karl Pflock that his
information about saucer wreckage and alien bodies was “nothing more than
rumors he had heard.” Similarly, Exon admitted to Stanton Friedman that he
“had heard scuttlebutt about bodies and wreckage, but had no firsthand
knowledge of the subject.”
For a sad case of apparent exaggeration we need look no further than Major
Jesse Marcel. UFO researchers Robert Todd and Kal Korff independently
obtained Marcel’s nearly 200-page long military service file and found, in
Korff s words, a pattern of Marcel “exaggerating things and repeatedly trying to
write himself into the history books.” Marcel had told book authors that he held
a college bachelor’s degree, had been a pilot of B-24s in World War II, received
five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft, and was himself shot
down. Yet absolutely none of this was true according to his own service file!
Marcel frequently changed his testimony about the Roswell debris. First he said
he had heard about someone trying to dent the metal with a hammer, then later
he said “we even tried making a dent in it with a 16-pound sledge hammer, still
no dent in it.” Sometimes he said the debris “didn’t burn very well,” and then
other times he claimed it would not burn at all. Marcel’s career lasted less than
three years after his humiliation at Roswell, when he resigned to open a small-
town TV repair shop. Gene Tighe worked under Marcel at Strategic Air
Command in Washington, D.C. Says Tighe, who ended his own career as a
general: “Marcel’s reputation suffered dramatically at SAC” in the aftermath of
Roswell.
Frank Kaufmann claims he watched a UFO explode on a radar screen, and
he was part of the military team sent to retrieve the wreckage and alien bodies.
The supposed site of the UFO explosion was more than 100 miles from the
radar unit Kaufmann said he was assigned to, yet radar in 1947 had an effective
range of no more than 40 miles. Under intense grilling by aerospace writer
Philip J. Klass in the 1990s, Kaufmann confessed that he was never a trained
radar operator. As for the site north of Roswell where Kaufmann says the UFO
crashed, an affidavit was sworn out in 1997 by Jim McKnight, whose aunt
owned the land in question, stating that “no one in my family had any
knowledge of such a UFO crash or military retrieval.” McKnight emphasized
that any military team entering the alleged crash area would have passed within
sight of his family’s ranch house. A final nail in Kaufmann’s tale comes from
his claim of having a diary from 1947 verifying his involvement in a crash
recovery. He has refused all requests to produce the diary and submit it to
forensic testing to substantiate its age.
James Ragsdale professed that he and a girlfriend saw the spacecraft crash
and they examined the alien bodies. His first rendering of the incident surfaced
in 1993 in the form of a notarized statement describing how he and the woman
investigated the crash north of Roswell at sunrise, watching from a distance as
the military recovered the craft and bodies. He managed to keep some of the
flying saucer debris, pieces that looked like carbon paper 18-30 inches long.
But in 1951 his car was stolen with a few saucer pieces in it, and in 1985 his
house was broken into and thieves stole the rest of the spacecraft. Two years
after this account Ragsdale significantly altered his story. On a videotape made
five days before his death from lung cancer, he changed the crash location to
Boy Scout Mountain, due west from Roswell. This time he said they had
visited the crash immediately that night, not the next morning. Ragsdale said he
even tried to pry the helmet off a dead alien to take home as a souvenir. Philip
Klass discovered how this fresh version of Ragsdale’s story was then being
marketed to benefit Ragsdale’s family, with The Roswell International UFO
Museum selling a 42-page booklet, The Jim Ragsdale Story, for $14.95, a one-
hour video with the same title for $29.50, and T-shirts picturing the new “Jim
Ragsdale Impact Site” for $13.95 each.
Retired Army officer Philip Corso claims he was in charge of “seeding”
alien technology harvested from the Roswell saucer, a modern Johnny
Appleseed handing out advanced secrets to select American defense
contractors. These and a myriad of other claims come packaged in his book,
The Day After Roswell, the circumstances of whose release in June 1997 raised
initial questions about Corso’s integrity and credibility. The first edition of the
book carried a brief foreward by U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, chairman of
the Senate Armed Services Committee, praising Corso for service to his
country. It turned out that Corso had apparently misled Thurmond, submitting
an entirely different book manuscript, Corso’s memoirs called I Walked With
Giants, for the senator to comment on, with no mention made of UFOs or
government conspiracies. Thurmond protested loudly and publicly, forcing
removal of the foreword from subsequent editions.
Inside the Roswell book Corso reprinted four UFO photographs he alleges
were taken from “Army Intelligence files as support material for the R&D
project to harvest the Roswell alien technology for military purposes.” Karl
Pflock, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan
administration, points out that all four photos have been in the public domain
for decades. One shows a 1935 Ford hubcap thrown into the air over Riverside,
California, in 1953. The other three photos are all lifted from the 1968 Condon
Committee report for the Air Force on UFOs, picturing such phenomena as, in
Pflock’s words, “a smoke ring generated by a simulated atom bomb
demonstration in 1957.”
A cursory examination of Corso’s book reveals a host of errors,
unsubstantiated claims, and blatant misrepresentations. Corso depicts Major
Jesse Marcel as being in charge of the removal of alien bodies from the
spacecraft, whereas Marcel always insisted he never saw alien bodies, nor did
he know anyone who had. Corso says the recovered alien craft is being stored
at Norton AFB, seemingly unaware Norton has been closed for years. Corso
claims he and the Army developed Corona, the world’s first spy satellite
program, to detect UFO landings. Pflock counters that Corona “was a 100
percent CIA-Air Force project, and the army had nothing to do with it.” Corso
writes that the B-2 stealth bomber was a Lockheed project, when anyone
familiar with aviation knows it is a Northrop creation. The list goes on and on.
Television reporter George Knapp has known Corso since 1992,
interviewing him on numerous occasions. According to Knapp, Corso “has a
tough-to-swallow story about an encounter with a live alien in the New Mexico
desert, in which the alien being telepathically communicated a strange
message.” Apparently that Corso experience proved too far out even for this
book as it does not appear. In an interview with CNI News, a UFO reporting
service, a glimpse emerged of what may be motivating Corso—beyond the
considerable financial reward—to sacrifice his reputation within mainstream
military and political circles. Boasting of his exploits in World War II, Corso
says he personally spirited 10,000 Jewish refugees out of Rome to Palestine. “I
thought nothing of it,” comments Corso, “but people said what a big thing it
was.” Now with revelations of his role in saving Earth from the threat of alien
invasion, maybe humankind will recognize and appreciate, perhaps even
worship, Philip Corso who by his own modest admission has “changed the
course of the world.”
Glenn Dennis worked as a Roswell mortician and first came forward in 1989
with his story of being at the base on the day saucer wreckage and bodies
arrived. Friends who had known Dennis for decades were surprised and
incredulous when he spoke up. Walter Haut remembers thinking “what the heck
would he know?” since Dennis had never mentioned this experience in three
decades of friendship. A review of Roswell base daily personnel accounting
records by Air Force investigators in 1996 found Dennis’ account “grossly
inaccurate” with “serious errors in his recollection of events.” A pediatrician
Dennis fingered as involved in the 1947 events did not serve in Roswell until
1951-53, and did not recall ever knowing Dennis. Also Dennis had told of a
“black sergeant” and a “big redheaded captain” who threatened him at the base
hospital where alien bodies were allegedly being autopsied. Racial integration
in the armed forces did not occur until 1949, and only one tall officer with red
hair matching Dennis’ description served at Roswell, but not until 1954. Dennis
claimed he spoke with a nurse in that period named Captain Wilson, yet roster
reviews found just one nurse named Wilson, who did not arrive until 1956.
Another nurse whose name Dennis gave as Naomi Selff, and who
supposedly told Dennis about participating in an alien autopsy, also could not
be located on rosters or in military records for any time frame. In 1995 Karl
Pflock asked Dennis if he had made up the nurse’s name. “No, no way. I’ve
never done that,” Dennis replied. Just a few months later Dennis conceded that
he had lied. The name was fictitious and he had swore an oath not to reveal her
actual identity. There were additional problems with his testimony. In early
interviews he said MPs had merely walked with him out of the base hospital
and away from the alien bodies inside. Several years passed and Dennis was
telling the story this way: “These two MPs grabbed me by the arms and carried
me clear outside. I didn’t walk, they carried me!” As for those baby caskets
Dennis says the base wanted, presumably to hold alien bodies, it turns out that
infant coffins were used by officers at Roswell to transport whiskey and other
alcohol on airplanes, a smuggling technique they learned to foil enlisted men
from pilfering the goods.
Witness memory repeatedly plays a vital though agile role in the Roswell
saga. Take the example of Dr. Curry Holden, the Texas Tech anthropologist
leading a student archaeological expedition who reportedly came across the
crashed saucer and alien bodies. Both Mrs. Holden and their daughter, Dr. Jane
Holden Kelly, said that Curry had never mentioned the event to them, nor did
his personal papers produce any corroboration. When Kevin Randle
interviewed Dr. Holden, obtaining his account of the sighting, Holden was 96
years old. Mrs. Holden cautioned Randle that her husband’s memory “wasn’t as
sharp as it once had been. He sometimes restructured his life’s events, moving
them in time so that they were subtly changed.”
Psychological studies indicate an estimated 25 percent of all human beings
are susceptible to false memories, a belief that something imagined, heard, or
read, actually happened to them personally. These studies have found memory
to be more like an evolving sculpture than a literal recording of events. Harvard
psychologist Daniel Schacter and other memory researchers note how over time
most of us refashion our memories so dramatically that we remember events
which never happened and forget what actually did occur. As we go beyond
middle age, memory distortion of the distant past gets worse.
University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has accumulated
research findings on a phenomena called “rehearsal,” in which over time we
play back our memories to ourselves again and again, refashioning the details
somewhat with each retelling, until the embellishments become a complete
memory and feel like the real event. That is why old married couples or
longtime friends will recall a shared experience very differently, each insistent
about being in possession of the accurate rendition. Memory also acts as a
“prestige-enhancing mechanism,” building up our egos by inflating our own
importance or central role in past events. Roswell “witnesses” embody
textbook studies of all these various ways in which we can be tricked by our
own consciousness in the pursuit of a desire for belief.
In their book UFO Crash At Roswell, Brandeis University anthropology
professors Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler call the “Roswell myth” a form
of social protest, an anti-government narrative about conspiracy and
manipulation, whose genesis is the cynicism engendered by the Watergate
scandal and the Vietnam War. That an insignificant crash of a balloon project
more than a half-century ago could rapidly evolve into a modern American
myth, on a scale comparable to the ancient myths of Greece and Rome, tells us
that in an age supposedly dominated by Science and Reason we remain at heart
a species of mystic, scanning the inward and outward heavens in our search for
a divine spark of meaning.
(Note: This version of the Roswell events was adapted from Fitzgerald’s 1998
book, Cosmic Test Tube, in which he tried to make the strongest possible case for
an extraterrestrial explanation of the debris, followed by this case for a Mogul
balloon solution to the Roswell mystery.)
References
Klass, Philip J. The Real Roswell Crashed-Saucer Coverup (Prometheus Books, 1997)
Korff, Kal K. The Roswell UFO Crash (Prometheus Books, 1997).
U.S. Air Force Report on the Roswell Incident (July, 1994).
U.S. Air Force The Roswell Report: Case Closed (June, 1997).
U.S. General Accounting Office Report on Roswell (July, 1995).
Vallée, Jacques. Revelations (Ballantine Books, 1991).
Roswell UFO Crash, The (Prometheus Books, 1997). Kal Korff makes a case
that the myth of a spaceship crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 arose from
a highly selective use of facts and witness testimony by a half-dozen
sensationalistic book authors. He dissects the credibility of key witnesses to the
alleged crash and points out how even the authors of the three major books
written about the incident sharply disagree about where it happened and how.
Ruwa (South Africa) landing On the playground of the Ariel School in

Ruwa, a suburb of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, one of the most remarkable
“close encounters of the third kind” occurred on Friday, September 16, 1994. It
was 10.00 A.M., time of the morning break, when with the ring of the bell
children started to pour out of the little class-houses of the Ariel School. That
morning they were alone on the playground, without the supervision of their
teachers, who had a meeting in the conference room of the office of the
headmaster, Mr. Colin Mackie.
According to the story, some of the children suddenly saw a purple light in
the sky above the forest, which kept coming and going. A moment later a disk
appeared—a huge, shiny craft with a flattened dome on top, surrounded by
yellow lights or portholes, which extending a tripod landing gear. The object
came down close to a rock on the other side of the swamp area, between the
trees on the edge of the forest. Balls of light or miniature disks appeared and
flew around for a short while. The pupils who saw it started to scream out of
surprise and fear. This drew the attention of nearly everyone on the playground,
and within seconds about a hundred pupils reportedly watched the incredible
spectacle.
The closest witnesses observed something coming out of the disk. First one,
then a second, and finally a third figure came out of the craft from the back of
its dome. The beings wore shiny, tight-fitting black overalls and had dark faces.
Two of them were bald but one had long, black hair. All three were about 4 to 5
feet tall. They had big black eyes, which some of the young witnesses
described as “like a cat’s eyes,” a tiny little mouth, and a small nose. Some of
the children could see a metal band around the head. All the younger kids were
scared and started crying.
One of the entities came closer than the rest and stared in the direction of the
children who all started screaming at once. At this moment, several of the
children thought they heard a voice in their minds, telling them there was
nothing to fear—from the aliens, at least. But the children said the UFO beings
had come to warn them that we humans are destroying planet Earth. After
about three minutes the creatures went back to their ship, where lights started to
flash, before the disk itself disappeared in a burst of light.
During the sighting, several of the children had run into the conference room
of the school to tell their teachers to come out and look. But when they
eventually arrived, not believing the children in the beginning, everything was
already over. Later, one class went to the landing site with their teacher, to find
dead birds, strange footprints, burning marks, an indentation in the grass and
heaps of dead ants.
Most children told their parents about the incidents who informed the media.
The case caused a stir in South Africa but was generally ignored elsewhere.
Soon after the event, Cynthia Hind, the Mutual UFO Network’s representative
for Africa and a resident of Harare, was able to perform a field investigation
and interview the eyewitnesses.
About half a year later, Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack visited the Ariel
school and questioned some of the children. He concluded that they certainly
had had a real experience, which had left a very deep impression upon them.
Several children had nightmares for weeks and month after. Some black
children interpreted the incident in the context of African mythology.
When this writer traveled to Ruwa two years later, he was still able to
interview 44 of the children, their teachers and parents on camera. The deep
psychological impact and the seriousness of the children convinced him as well
as Dr. Mack that the case is authentic. Because of the high number of credible
eyewitnesses, the Ruwa case is considered by some to be one of the most
significant events in the history of the UFO phenomenon.
—MICHAEL HESEMANN
S
Sagan, Carl (1934-1996). Carl Sagan was a first-rate scientist and popularizer
of astronomy, whose award-winning 13-part Cosmos series on public television
attracted more than 500 million viewers in 60 countries. Dr. Sagan was the
David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the
Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University; Distinguished Visiting
Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology;
and co-founder and President of The Planetary Society, the largest space
interest group in the world.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author for his 1977 #1 bestselling book, The
Dragons of Eden, Sagan published numerous books on space, evolution, and
the environment, which all together sold millions of copies. His science-fiction
novel Contact (1985) was made into a major motion picture.
His principal research activities were concerned with the physics and
chemistry of planetary atmospheres and surfaces, space vehicle exploration of
the planets, and the origin of life on Earth. He was also known for his studies in
exobiology (now sometimes called astrobiology), the emerging discipline
which deals with the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the means for its
detection. Dr. Sagan played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and
Galileo missions to the planets, for which he received numerous awards over
the years, including the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences.
He served as chairman of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the
American Astronomical Society and as chairman of the Astronomy Section of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He also served as
an adviser to the American Geophysical Union, CETI Foundation, International
Academy of Astronautics, Smithsonian, and NASA.
Carl Sagan on the cover of Astronomy magazine (November 1999)
In addition to hundreds of published scientific and popular articles, Dr.

Sagan was author, co-author, or editor of more than two dozen books including
Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966); UFOs—A Scientific Debate, edited with
Thornton Page (1972); Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence
(1973); Mars and the Mind of Man (1973); The Cosmic Connection (1973), for
which he received the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science
book of the year (1974); The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution
of Human Intelligence (1977), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize;
Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (1978); Broca’s Brain
(1979); Cosmos (1980), which topped the bestseller lists for 70 weeks; Comet
(1985), with Ann Druyan; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992), with Ann
Druyan; Pale Blue Dot (1994); and The Demon-Haunted World (1995).
He received his A.B., B.S., M.S. in physics, and his Ph.D. in astronomy and
astrophysics all from the University of Chicago, subsequently serving as Miller
Research Fellow in the Institute for Basic Research in Science, University of
California, Berkeley; as assistant professor of genetics at Stanford University
Medical School; as astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory; and as assistant professor of astronomy at Harvard University. In
1968 he moved to Cornell University, where he became a tenured professor in
1971.
Dr. Sagan played a major role in obtaining the first close-up photos of the
moons of Mars, in studying the surface changes on that planet, and in the
search for life on Mars. He was active in education of the disadvantaged, was a
popular lecturer before audiences of nonscientists, and became an activist
against nuclear proliferation.
Sagan was also leader of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on
Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, organized jointly by the U. S.
National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences in
Armenia in 1971, and had the principal responsibility for placing Man’s first
interstellar messages aboard Pioneers 10 and 11, and Voyagers 1 and 2, the first
spacecraft to leave the solar system.
POSITION STATEMENT: The interest in unidentified flying objects derives,

perhaps, not so much from scientific curiosity as from unfulfilled religious
needs. Flying Saucers serve, for some, to replace the gods that science has
deposed. With their distant and exotic worlds and their pseudoscientific overlay,
the contact accounts are acceptable to many people who reject the older religious
frameworks. But precisely because people desire so intently that unidentified
flying objects be of benign intelligent, and extraterrestrial origin, honesty
requires that, in evaluating the observations, we accept only the most rigorous
logic and the most convincing evidence. At the present time, there is no evidence
that unambiguously connects the various flying saucer sightings and contact
tales with extraterrestrial intelligence.
And, more recently, Sagan posed these questions:
Which...is more likely: that we’re undergoing a massive but generally
overlooked invasion by alien sexual abusers, or that people are experiencing
some unfamiliar internal mental state they do not understand? Admittedly,
we’re very ignorant both about extraterrestrial beings, if any, and about human
psychology. But if these really were the only two alternatives, which one would
you pick?
And if the alien abduction accounts are mainly about brain physiology,
hallucinations, distorted memories of childhood, and hoaxing, don’t we have
before us a matter of supreme importance—touching on our limitations, the
ease with which we can be misled and manipulated, the fashioning of our
beliefs, and perhaps even the origins of our religions? There is genuine
scientific paydirt in UFOs and alien abductions—but it is, I think, of a
distinctly homegrown and terrestrial character.
(Position statement was adapted from Sagan’s article entitled “Unidentified

Flying Objects” in the Encyclopedia Americana, 1975, and from his 1995 book,
The Demon-Haunted World.)
St. Clair (Illinois) police sighting Not only did UFO sightings begin soon
after the beginning of the 21st Century, they started with a “bang,” with one of
the possibly most dramatic, and well documented cases in recent years.
At approximately 4:00 A.M. (Central Time) on Wednesday, January 5, 2000,
Mr. Melvern Noll of Highland, Illinois, stopped at his miniature golf course on
his way home from work to satisfy himself that the facility was secure. As he
returned to his truck, he glanced to the northeast, where minutes earlier he had
noticed an unusually prominent “star.” He was surprised to see that not only did
the “star” now appear brighter, but it actually appeared to be drawing closer to
his location.
He stood for several minutes watching the light, and quickly came to the
conclusion that it was, in fact, attached to a much larger, rectangular shaped
object. What shocked him most of all, however, was that the object appeared to
have two rows of “windows,” located toward, or on, its aft end. In addition, its
ventral surface exhibited many small red lights, and it appeared to be perhaps
the size of a football field!
Mr. Noll’s sighting was the beginning of a long chain of events that morning
over St. Clair County, Illinois, that would involve multiple police officers from
eight police departments, several citizens, and possibly Scott Air Force Base
personnel. The incident quickly gained considerable attention from the press,
and the events were still being debated in the public forum weeks afterward.
Mr. Noll drove directly to the Highland Police Department, hoping that he
could convince anyone on duty there to step outside and look at the object.
Most of all, he wanted the police dispatcher to broadcast an alert to surrounding
areas so that others would observe it, which they did.
Police Officer Ed Barton, of the Lebanon, Illinois, police department, heard
the transmission from the Highland Police dispatcher, which caused him to start
scanning the night sky to the northeast from his location in Lebanon. What he
saw were two intensely bright lights, close to the horizon, and in the direction
of Highland. The lights were positioned very close together, and they were so
bright that they appeared to radiate “rays,” or “spikes,” of light into the dark
morning sky.
Officer Barton started driving in the general direction of the object, at times
traveling at 75 or 80 miles an hour, and with his overhead flashers on. As he
drove east from Lebanon, he realized that the very peculiar-looking object
appeared to be moving in his direction. He stopped his vehicle, turned off the
lights, and sat quietly, hoping to hear whether any sound might be detectable.
As it got closer, he could see that it looked like a slender triangle, longer
than it was wide, with a very prominent white light in each of its corners. He
estimated that it was at least 75 feet long and perhaps 40 feet wide, although he
could not estimate his distance from the object at the time. He noted that the
body of the object “blotted” out the stars as it moved slowly across the sky,
confirming his suspicion that it was a “solid” object.
When the object was at its closest to Officer Barton’s police cruiser, perhaps
100 feet horizontally and at an altitude of perhaps 1,000 feet, he estimated, it
suddenly rotated in the horizontal plane, so it was then pointed to the
southwest. The officer radioed the St. Clair County Dispatch to apprise them
that he was observing the object, when it almost instantly accelerated so
dramatically that his eyes were not able to track it.Subsequent analysis
suggested to investigators that the object probably moved not less than 8 miles
across the Illinois countryside in the approximately 3 seconds that Officer
Barton was observing it!
Next, Officer David Martin of the Shiloh, Illinois, Police Department
witnessed the object moving slowly to the west. His description of the object’s
appearance was similar to Officer Barton’s; namely a strange, triangular object
with three white lights in the corners, and with red and green lights on its aft
end. Officer Martin was watching the object from his cruiser as it suddenly
increased its velocity an estimated five- or six-fold, and disappeared from his
sight to the west of Shiloh.
The third police officer to witness the object was Officer Craig Stevens of
the Millstadt Police Department. He drove his police cruiser to Liederkranz
Park, in the north end of Millstadt, and observed the object in the northern sky
from that location. He estimated its elevation at 500-1,000 feet, and he thought
he could detect a faint buzzing or humming sound emanate from the object.
The object appeared generally triangular in shape, with white lights in the
corners, and a red light in the center of the ventral surface of the craft.
Officer Stevens quickly obtained a Polaroid camera from the trunk of his
cruiser and took a hasty photograph of the object, the only photo taken by any
of the observers. Unfortunately, the quality of the photo was low, given the cold
conditions at the time, which interfere with chemical development of Polaroid
film.
The last police officer to observe the object was an unnamed officer from the
Dupo, Illinois, Police Department. He observed the object to the east of Dupo,
at a relatively high altitude at the time, he thought, and traveling now generally
toward the north-northeast, where it quickly disappeared from his view.
Among the many interesting aspects of the case are: (1) the peculiar
appearance of the object, (2) the unorthodox manner in which it was observed
to maneuver, (3) the almost unbelievable rate at which it could accelerate, and
(4) its apparent huge size. In addition, the case is made even more interesting
by both the large number, and high quality, of the observers, most of them
experienced, on-duty police officers, who reported the incident over their radios
at the time they were observing it.
Another interesting aspect of the case is the fact that in passing near the
town of Shiloh, Illinois, the peculiar object passed within as estimated two
miles of Scott Air Force Base, which is thought to maintain personnel in it
control tower on a 24-hour basis. However, when asked whether any of the
tower personnel had witnessed the object that morning, the base personnel
stated that the tower had not been staffed for several hours on the morning of
the sighting, due to an unexplained suspension of operations. No explanation
for the shut down was ever revealed by Air Force personnel.
—PETER B. DAVENPORT & DAVID MARLER
San Carlos (Venezuela) incident Jesus Paz and two friends had dined at a
restaurant at San Carlos, then proceeded home. According to their tale, when
the party neared the Exposition Park of the Ministry of Agriculture, Paz asked
the driver of the car to stop while he went behind some bushes, apparently to
relieve himself. His friends, still in the car, heard a piercing scream, which
literally raised the hair on their heads.
They rushed toward the spot where Paz had entered the brush, came upon
their friend unconscious on the ground, and were just in time to see a hairy
dwarf running toward a flat, shiny craft which hovered a few feet from the
ground. One of the men, Luis Mejia, a national guardsman, reached for his gun,
but remembered it was back in his barracks at Guard headquarters. Mejia then
picked up a stone and futilely threw it at the craft, which had taken the dwarf in
and was rising into the air with a deafening buzzing sound.
A rendering of the San Carlos incident by artist Hal Crawford
At last report, Paz was under the care of doctors and all three men were
telling a convincingly hair-raising story to the authorities. Paz was not only
suffering from shock but had several large, long, deep scratches on his right
side and along the spine, as if clawed by a wild animal.
Schwarz, Berthold E. (b. 1924). Since 1955, Dr. Berthold Schwarz, a

psychiatrist, has been in private practice in Montclair, New Jersey, and since
1981 in Vero Beach, Florida.
Originally from Jersey City, New Jersey, Dr. Schwarz received his diploma
in medicine from the Dartmouth Medical School in 1945. He graduated from
the New York University College of Medicine in 1950, interned at Mary
Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1951; and was a
fellow in psychiatry at the Mayo Foundation from 1951 to 1955. He received
an M.S. in psychiatry from the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in 1957.
Berthold Schwarz
Dr. Schwarz has studied various forms of psychic phenomena since a World
War II telepathic experience involving his mother, when his brother was killed
in action.
In his professional career he has studied telepathic communications in the
parent-child and physician-patient telepathic communications in the parent-
child and physician-patient relationships. Dr. Schwarz has also studied a
number of extraordinary paragnosts (or psychics), abductees, and contactees.
Dr. Schwarz is the author of Psychic-Dynamics, published in paperback as A
Psychiatrist Looks at ESP (1965), The Jacques Romano Story (1968), Parent-
Child Telepathy (1971), Psychic Nexus: Psychic Phenomena in Psychiatry and
in Everyday Life (1980), UFO-Dynamics: Psychiatric and Psychic Aspects of
the UFO Syndrome (1983), Into the Crystal: the Miracles of Peter Sugleris
(1993), and Psychiatric and Paranormal Aspects of UFOlogy (1998). He is co-
author with B.A. Ruggieri, M.D. of Parent-Child Tensions (1958), and You
CAN Raise Decent Children (1971). Dr. Schwarz has authored more than 130
articles, appearing both in medical journals and in the UFO literature.
P.O. Box 4030
Address: Vero Beach, FL 32964
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: The outstanding features of many close-encounter

UFO experiences are the psychic aspects. These often appear freakish, fantastic,
paradoxical, and—to the untrained observer—psychotic.
Despite the abundance of UFO-associated psi material, and the not
infrequent existence of past similar related events for those who have had close
UFO encounters, serious study of the psychic aspects of UFOs has often been
neglected. Notwithstanding, considerable public ridicule of those who claim
contact with UFOs, this negative attitude has not caused reports of these
experiences to disappear. On the contrary, numerous UFO-contact cases and/or
their related psi phenomena are “repeaters.” Although UFO publications give
many details about the physical and astronomical parameters of UFOs, they
have often side-stopped the psychic segments of this equation.
I believe that these UFO-related psychic experiences constitute subjective
reality for many of these people, and that what they report is similar to
paranormal material in general. These UFO contactees and abductees should be
studied by behavioral scientists who are also thoroughly experienced and
knowledgeable in psychic matters. An inability to understand these UFO events
does not mean they did not happen.
Whatever the final explanation for the UFO mystery, there has been a
noticeable shift from the more respectable extraterrestrial hypothesis to the
psychic hypothesis, which mandates a greater awareness of the complexity of
the issues, the significance of the personal-human attributes, and the apparent
mind-matter interface. In our present state of technology and science, the
psychic hypothesis could be a most practical one for exploration and discovery.
—BERTHOLD E. SCHWARZ
science fiction and UFOs A longstanding symbiotic relationship has

persisted between UFO beliefs and science fiction (SF) literature and movies.
Jules Verne embodied the expectation of a successful flying machine in his
novels, Robur the, Conqueror (1886) and Master of the World (1904), during a
time when people began to report phantom airships and other nonexistent
flying devices in anticipation of their invention. Countless dime-novel
productions took up the same theme of successful aerial navigation. The spirit
of the turn-of-the-century world was one of boundless confidence in human
inventiveness, a faith that all things were possible and all human limitations
could be overcome. Both literature and UFO reports of the period reflected this
belief.
Jules Verne’s airship in 1886
Extraterrestrial visitors also entered literature in the 19th century. H. G.

Wells wrote the most famous invasion novel in 1897, The War of the Worlds.
He drew on scientific speculation about life on Mars and imagined the Martians
as inhabitants of a dying planet who “regarded this earth with envious eyes,”
then attacked it with advanced technology in preparation for colonization.
Another 1897 novel, Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz, again created an invasion
from Mars. only this time the Martians were of human form. Not long after, a
short story told of a Martian who worked at the Lowell Observatory and
destroyed any photographs showing the canals of Mars—an early version of the
alien secret agent amongst us.
The alien visitor theme has remained popular ever since. In fact it nearly
defines science fiction in the minds of most people. Reports of crashed Martian
spaceships appeared as early as the 1870s and 1880s, while both speculation
and a number of airship reports from 1896-97 included references to Martian
visitors. Needless to say, this theme of alien visitation has dominated
explanatory ideas about UFOs from the early days of flying saucers to the
present.
As soon as the heavens became a scene of action, they also became a source
of danger in SF literature. More than any other invention, the flying machine
represented an almost magical potential for freedom and power. Ambivalence
toward this potential is evident in Verne’s novels where flight is indeed
wonderful, but Robur turns his machine to conquest and destruction. In his
poem, “Locksley Hall,” Alfred Lord Tennyson looks into the future and sees a
terrible time when wars will be fought by aerial navies, but he tempers this
vision with the prophecy that in a more distant future universal peace and world
union will follow from the abolition of distance by air travel. Arthur Conan
Doyle raised the possibility that the air itself may contain unknown dangers. He
wrote a story about a pilot attempting to set a high altitude record, who
discovered that vicious snakelike creatures inhabited the upper atmosphere. Yet
more than anything else, the idea of aliens lent a sense of foreboding to the sky.
Other worlds could hold an almost infinite variety of threats, and their capacity
to endanger the Earth was limited only by imagination. They could descend at
any time. The panic following the Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of
the Worlds in 1938 indicates that some sense of potential peril had settled into
public consciousness. Throughout the UFO era, a wariness about alien motives
has persisted.
A second important formative era began in the 1920s with the advent of pulp
science fiction magazines. During this golden age of the 1920s to the 1940s,
stories proliferated of aliens, their craft, and their often evil motives. On the eve
of flying saucers and during the early days of the mystery, cover art and articles
in such magazines as Amazing Stories promoted “ancient astronaut” ideas
decades before Erich von Däniken.
Fictional flying saucer in 1930
Subtler ideas about the nature of alien beings developed in such novels as
Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier. Drawing on suggestions from Charles
Fort, Russell postulated that we shared the Earth with hordes of usually
invisible globes: beings who fed on human emotional energies and goaded us
into wars for the sake of an occasional feast. Once in a while these beings
became visible as luminous objects in the sky. Without this popular literature to
foster space consciousness and promote the idea of extraterrestrials, an
association between UFOs and aliens might have been much slower in coming.
In the mid-1940s an even more paranoid idea took hold as the Shaver
Mystery appeared in the pages of Amazing Stories. Richard S. Shaver claimed
that caverns beneath the Earth contained two races left over from ancient
Atlantis and Lemuria. The good beings were the teros and the evil beings were
the deros. Using the high technology of these elder civilizations, the two races
were locked in a conflict to manipulate and control humankind.
The idea of advanced races within the Earth has a history of its own with
such milestones as Bulwer Lytton’s 1870s novel, The Coming Race. Hollow
Earth ideas go back even further, and tales of remnant civilizations from lost
continents equipped with flying machines and other wonders have precedent in
such mystical literature as A Dweller on Two Planets (1899). Yet for many
people Shaver’s stories struck a sympathetic chord, and editor Ray Palmer
fostered the Shaver Mystery until it cost him his job with Amazing Stories.
When Kenneth Arnold reported flying saucers, Palmer took an immediate
interest in this new mystery. He saw in it another facet of a larger mystery and
never accepted the extraterrestrial hypothesis as the full or final solution for
UFOs. Links between UFOs and the Shaver Mystery have appeared time and
again in the UFO literature.
Not all science fiction casts alien visitors in an unfavorable light. Sometimes
the aliens come as saviors rather than destroyers. as in Harold M. Sherman’s
story, “The Green Man,” which appeared in the October 1946 issue of Amazing
Stories. A sequel, “The Green Man Returns,” appeared in December 1948 and
depicts the alien as a Christlike figure. A familiar movie from 1952, The Day
the Earth Stood Still, also presents an alien on a mission to help keep the people
of Earth from destroying themselves. The first contactees, whose stories also
contained saintly visitors and messages of peace, followed suspiciously soon
after this movie.
Flying saucers entered into popular culture from the late 1940s onward
through science fiction literature, comic books, advertisements, rock and roll
songs, and television shows—but nowhere as strikingly as in the movies. Many
of them borrowed images and ideas from actual reports. Donald Keyhoe’s
books became a source of technical background for Earth Versus the Flying
Saucers (1956) and J. Allen Hynek was an advisor for Close Encounters of the
Third Kind (1977).
Fictional abduction in 1930
The vision of future spaceship design in Forbidden Planet (1955) and

exemplified by the Enterprise in Star Trek shows earthlings borrowing the
saucer design. Invasion has remained a common theme, especially in the Cold
War-haunted 1950s, either overt as in George Pal’s version of War of the
Worlds (1953) or surreptitiously as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
Many films echo the notion that the aliens have fled a dead or dying planet and
seek a new home, as in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) or have
come to exploit the Earth as a way to same their home planet, as in This Island
Earth (1955). A contrasting view of aliens as friends, if not outright saviors,
appears in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982) and Cocoon (1986). Aliens as age-
old visitors to Earth and important influences in the course of human
civilization figure in The Thing (1951). Anyone familiar with abductions
cannot help but be impressed by the parallels in such movies as Invaders from
Mars (1953) and Killers from Space (1953).
Science fiction has anticipated much of UFO lore and UFO lore has found
its way into science fiction time and again. The relationship has been a busy
two-way street. An examination of the science fiction literature cautions that
whatever the nature of UFOs, the beliefs people have and the stories they tell
about these objects reflect cultural expectations and concerns as well as
objective observation. Reports combine both cultural beliefs and perceptual
experience. An intriguing trend toward magic and the supernatural, as opposed
to mechanical wonders, has lent a fairy-tale quality to much recent fiction. A
similar trend is apparent in UFO reports as abductions and other sightings seem
to involve nonphysical objects and surrealistic experiences. Perhaps a new
mystical consciousness is in the making.
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (Bantam Books, 1969).

For two years, thirty-seven scientists and researchers under the direction of Dr.
Edward Condon, a University of Colorado physicist, examined UFO reports
and issued a 958-page report constituting this book.
Scientist: A Novel Autobiography, The (Lippincott, 1978). Pioneer
dolphin intelligence researcher John C. Lilly writes about his belief that he can
psychically tune into an inter-galactic communication channel with solid-state
alien intelligence. These aliens inhabit another reality and operate Earth
Coincidence Control, a message center in which a few special humans and all
whales and dolphins receive telepathic interstellar communications.
Schirmer abduction The following events allegedly occurred near Ashland,

Nebraska, on the morning of December 3, 1967. Police Patrolman Herbert
Schirmer said he sighted a football-shaped object encircled by red, flashing
lights, which, after a few moments, “shot straight out of sight.” Schirmer claims
to have gone through a twenty-minute amnesic period immediately following
the sighting, which was later “unlocked” during time-regression hypnosis.
At around 2:30 A.M., Patrolman Schirmer, in his police cruiser, had just
checked a livestock barn, where he found the cattle making noise and kicking
in their stalls. Minutes later, he approached the intersection of highways 6 and
63 on the outskirts of Ashland. About a quarter-mile in front of him, near the
highway, appeared a series of red, flashing or blinking lights that shone through
the oval portholes of a landed, football-shaped craft. The object was further
described as having what appeared to be a polished, aluminum surface, a
catwalk around its periphery, and tripod legs underneath. Suddenly, the object
rose, emitting a siren-like sound and a red-orange flame from its underside.
Upon returning to the police station, Schirmer noticed the time to be 3 A.M.
This seemed odd, since he was sure that only ten minutes had elapsed since the
sighting. He filed a standard police report, which read in part: “Saw a flying
saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not!”
Following a news release of his sighting, Schirmer was interrogated by
members of the University of Colorado UFO Project, headed by Edward
Condon. After a preliminary interview in Ashland, he was taken to the
university headquarters for further psychological testing. When placed under
time-regression hypnosis by Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist from the
University of Wyoming, Schirmer related what he believed had happened
during the twenty-minute “timeloss.”
The following details are given here in Schirmer’s own words:
“The craft actually pulled me and the car up the hill, toward it; and then as I
was going up the road, and the car came to a dead stop, a form came out from
underneath the craft and started moving toward the car! And as the one being
came to the front of the car, another one was coming out, and the one that was
standing in front of the patrol car had sort of a box-like thing in his hand and
kind of flashed green all around the whole car. And then one approached the
car and reached in and touched me on my neck, at which I felt a sharp amount
of pain—and then sort of stood back and sort of moved his hand and I just
came right up out of the car, standing right in front of him, and he asked me,
‘Are you the Watchman of this town?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’
“The crew leader had a very high forehead, a very long nose; his eyes were
sort of sunken in, and they were round eyes like ours, except for their
pupils...were sort of the form of a, I would say, like a cat’s eye. And their
complexion was sort of a grayish-pink. I couldn’t see any hair or ears because
they were covered by the form of the uniform over their head; there was like a
small black box on the other side with a very small antenna sticking up out of
it. The mouth was sort of a slit, and as he spoke to me, it came like a very deep
tone of voice, like from deep within, and he didn’t move his mouth at all.
“He said, ‘Watchman, come with me...’ and we went up to the craft; and as
we got to the craft, he took me up into what I call the first level of it ...and
we’re standing there looking at these, like 55-gallon barrel drums in a big circle
(in the first level), and had black cables being connected to each one of them.
And then right in the center of the room, as we looked up, was like a half of a
cocoon—and it was spinning, giving off bright colors like the rainbow. And he
said, ‘Watchman, this is our power source: reversible electrical-magnetism.’ We
moved over to where we came up in, and just kind of floated up into the second
level—just zzzzz!—like you go up on an elevator. It was like red light inside,
and this big cone was spinning, and there was all kinds of panels and computers
and stuff like this; and there was a map on the wall, and there was this large
screen, like a vision screen there...and he walked up and he pressed some
buttons, and he pointed toward the stars and he said, ‘That’s where we’re
from....’ There was writing on the map and I couldn’t tell really what it was—it
was a map of a sun and six planets! They were from a nearby galaxy and that’s
all he ever said...he never said exactly where they were from or anything...he
just pointed at the map. They were observing us and had been observing us for
a long time.
“He said, ‘Watchman, the reason why we’re here is to get electricity,’ and
they extracted electricity from one of the power poles there, which led to the
main power source there in Ashland. And this sort of antenna that was on the
edge of the ship kind of lifted down...this one was pressing buttons ...and a bolt
went out and hit the big transformer and bolted back; and the pole was burning,
and it went like that for maybe a minute or so, and they shut it off.
“In the top part of where we were was like an observation deck—there was
panels and chairs and a big observation window there; and he told me...he said,
‘Watchman (and he pointed toward the stars), you yourself will see the universe
as I have seen it.’
“He said, ‘Watchman, come with me...’ and we went back and went straight
down and outside and started walking toward the patrol car. And as we
approached the car, he said, ‘Watchman, what you have seen and what you
have heard, you will not remember. The only thing that you’ll remember is that
you’ve seen something land and something take off....’ And that was it.
The Condon Report concluded as follows: “Evaluation of psychological
assessment tests, the lack of any evidence, and interviews with the patrolman,
left project staff with no confidence that the trooper’s reported UFO experience
was physically real.” Dr. Sprinkle expressed the opinion that “the trooper
believed in the reality of the events he described.”
The Schirmer case is a “classic” in more ways than one. (1) It is the
quintessential composite of classic UFO lore. (2) The account is told with such
exquisite naïveté on the part of the experiencer that no one doubts his sincerity
to this day. (3) Likewise, while telling what he clearly believed to be the
unvarnished truth, officer Schirmer reveals the primitive state of the average
person’s knowledge of science and technology—especially astronomy—which
earmarks the tale as a fantasy.
Herbert Schirmer’s drawing of the crew leader
More detailed information—which includes edited transcripts of “time-

regression” hypnosis sessions by professional hypnotist Loring G. Williams—
appears in two books by author-investigator Eric Norman (penname for Warren
Smith): Gods, Demons and Space Chariots (1970) and Gods and Devils from
Outer Space (1973).
Eric Norman (Warren Smith) in the company of another famed author-
investigator, Brad Steiger (penname for Eugene Olson), extracted a wealth of
fascinating detail from Schirmer in their 1968 investigation. Though it doesn’t
take much to improve upon the pseudoscientific techniques (consisting mostly
of academic snobbery) of the so-called Condon Committee, Norman achieved
what Condon’s “investigators” did not know how to do. Without fanfare, he
simply obtained and communicated the relevant information. Through the
hypnotic sessions conducted by Williams, Norman uncovered the following
details.
According to Schirmer, the spacemen were from a nearby galaxy, but had
bases on Venus, Jupiter, and other planets of our solar system. Their purpose in
coming to Earth was to obtain electricity from our power lines. Their saucer,
which was made of 100 percent pure magnesium, operates on the principle of
“reversible electro-magnetism” (whatever that means) and traveled at a speed
of 150,000 “something” (Schirmer wasn’t sure whether it was miles per hour,
miles per second, or what—but it flew pretty darned fast). The spacecraft was
102 feet in diameter, Schirmer was told, and in addition to using measurements
in “feet,” the aliens also carried standard 55-gallon drums interconnected by
cables for some unknown purpose (maybe for the storage of electricity). One is
struck by the absence of miniaturization, which is one of the hallmarks of our
own advancing technology. The space travelers also had buttons, dials, and
gauges on their control panels—another throwback to our own 50s technology
—which raises the greatest mystery of all: with this kind of backward
technology, how did they ever get here—from another galaxy, no less—in the
first place! A ladder was used to enter the “observation ship,” as it was called,
which sat upon tripod legs.
A large “vision screen” (just like in Star Trek) inside the saucer enabled its
occupants to see outside. The saucermen were, of course, outfitted with ray
guns (which they carried in belt-mounted holsters) and wore one-piece coverall
suits which included radio transmitters built-in to their skull-cap type
“helmets.” Schirmer likened the aliens’ uniform to “...a flight suit you buy at
the Army surplus stores....” Inasmuch as the aliens were said to have telepathic
abilities, one wonders why they would still need primitive “walkie-talkie”
devices with little antennas sticking out.
Again, this is one of the hallmarks of 50s science fiction, and in fact
Schirmer’s description closely resembles “The Man from Planet X,” from the
1950 film by the same name. Coincidentally, “The Man from Planet X” also
had mind-control abilities as did Schirmer’s aliens.
Yet another mystery is why intelligent space-faring aliens would establish a
base on a planet like Venus—with an atmosphere of sulfuric acid, crushing
atmospheric pressure, and a surface temperature high enough to melt lead.
Perhaps the aliens are not quite as intelligent as we thought.
Schirmer also said that the spacemen “...had a program called ‘breeding
analysis’ and some humans had been used in these experiments.” This tidbit
anticipates the current genetic-hybrid trend that dominates the new UFOlogy.
One last point should not go unmentioned. While under an hypnotic trance,
Schirmer produced a drawing of an emblem the UFOnauts all wore on the
upper- right chest portion of their uniforms. It was a serpent with wings. Eric
Norman reminds us that this “...was an accurate depiction of the feathered
serpent” which had been documented throughout our history in ancient Aztec
lore, Chinese legends, and all over the world. Norman then posed the question:
“Could the UFOnatus and their emblem of the winged serpent be connected
with the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden? Was the ‘snake’ merely
a symbol of UFOnauts?”
We now come to the crux of the issue. Does the same symbolism appear in
UFOlogy and ancient mythology because extraterrestrials have influenced—or
even created—us, or do we project our distinctly human archetypes and culture
onto them?
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Gillmor, Daniel S., ed. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. (Bantam Books, 1969). “Final
Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects” Conducted by the University of
Colorado under contract to the United States Air Force, Dr. Edward U. Condon, Scientific Director.
Kottmeyer, Martin S. Unpublished notes and personal correspondence.
Norman, Eric. God’s Demons and Space Chariots (Lancer Books, 1970).
———. Gods and Devils from Outer Space (Lancer Books, 1973).
Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday, 1980).
Schuessler, John F. (b. 1933). John Schuessler has been involved in the U.S.
manned space program since 1962 and has been a UFO researcher since 1965.
He is a founding member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and as of
July 16, 2000, its International Director. He has written numerous articles for
Skylook and the MUFON UFO Journal and has been a featured speaker at eight
MUFON symposia. He administers the MUFON Medical Committee,
composed of consultants with medical degrees.
John Schuessler
Schuessler is currently a member of the UFO Research Coalition Board of

Directors and a Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) associate. He was a founding
member and past President of the UFO Study Group of Greater St. Louis, Inc.,
and the Houston-based Vehicle Internal Systems Investigative Team (VISIT).
He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs. In 1996 he
cataloged his research in a book entitled UFO-Related Human Physiological
Effects. In 1998, he published a book entitled The Cash-Landrum UFO
Incident: Three Texans Are Injured During an Encounter With a UFO and
Military Helicopters.
Schuessler retired after 36 years in aerospace engineering with McDonnell
Douglas and The Boeing Company, where he was involved in engineering for
most manned space programs, from Project Mercury to the International Space
Station. He held positions as Project Manager for Space Shuttle Flight
Operations, Director of Engineering, and Director of General Support. In 1998
he was awarded the NASA Public Service Medal for his leadership of the
NASA Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory proj-ect.
Schuessler holds B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Houston
Clear Lake. He is an Associate Fellow in the American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics (AIAA), and a member of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (AAAS), the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics
Association (AFCEA), the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE), the
National Space Society (NSS), the Planetary Society, and the World Future
Society. He is a past member of the NASA Johnson Space Center Human Space
Flight Awareness Council, University of Texas Department of Aerospace
Engineering Industry Visiting Committee, Houston Ellington Field Airport
Development Task Force, Clear Lake Area Economic Development Foundation
Education Committee, National Contract Management Association, the Clear
Lake Transportation Partnership and past-president of the Friends of the
Freeman Memorial Library in Houston, Texas.
P.O. Box 369

Address: Morrison, CO 80465
U.S.A.
E-mail: schuessler@mho.net

POSITION STATEMENT: After years of amassing information about
Unconventional Flying Objects (UFOs) I have come to the conclusion that we
are dealing with a very complex mystery on an international scale. While the
time-tested ways of investigating this mystery are still useful and must be con
tinued, new approaches must be tried as well.
A basic problem is the lack of cooperation between individuals and groups.
Whether or not this is caused by human nature in general or it is a part of some
devious plan; it impedes progress, causes data to become obscured and
questioned, and is usually harmful to the witnesses and investigators alike. I
look forward to greater cooperation in the future through a loose federation of
most of the UFO organizations in the world. I look at it as the United Nations
of ufology. The power of a federation of this nature has outstanding
ramifications for everyone involved.
Another problem stems from the way UFOs are investigated. While it is
important to continue to gather and record case information using well-
established investigative practices, more must be done. The tools used today in
UFO cases are much the same as those used 50 years ago. We need to find
ways to tap the myriad of new electronic technologies now available in most
government agencies for use in UFO investigations.
The characteristics of the objects described in UFO reports appear to evolve
over time to stay just beyond the state-of-the-art of technology as we know it.
This presents the challenge to researchers to forecast where UFO technology is
headed and to develop ways to detect and record the new data as the mystery
evolves.
While the quality of UFO investigations improves continuously, we have a
tough job ahead. I approach that job with the following points in mind:
• UFO reports worldwide continue unabated

• The journalistic approach to resolving the mystery has failed. It has only
created camps of believers and disbelievers
• Debating whether or not UFOs exist is futile. As long as we have unresolved
reports, UFOs do exist.
• High quality UFO reports are inspirational to many individuals involved in
science and technology. They want to know “what’s under the hood.”
• Existing technologies, if properly utilized, could aid engineers and scientists
in they quest to solve the UFO mystery.
• Until governments decide to support their people with free and open
channels of UFO information, the quest for truth will be a slow and difficult
task.
• Our future may depend on the ultimate outcome of UFO research.
—JOHN F. SCHUESSLER
Scully hoax Frank Scully’s book Behind the Flying Saucers caused a sensation
when it was published in 1950. Scully told of three crashed saucers that he
claimed were being investigated by officials and scientists of the United States
government. According to the story, one flying saucer had crashed in Paradise
Valley near Phoenix, Arizona, and the other two were found in the vicinity of
Aztec, New Mexico. Thirty-four dead bodies were allegedly found inside the
three “spacecraft.” The occupants were little humanoids, measuring between
thirty-six to forty-two inches in height, and were charred brown, presumably
from sudden decompression.
In addition to their small size, there were a few other peculiarities: The little
men had no cavities in their teeth, and they drank “heavy” water (about twice
as heavy as normal drinking water). There was a food supply on board,
consisting of little wafers that when dropped into a pail of water would swell
up, causing the water to overflow. The heavy water and concentrated food, it
was conjectured, might have been an aid to space flight.
Their dress consisted of dark-blue uniforms without any insignia on their
collars or caps to give a clue as to where they might be from (although it was
somehow determined that the little fellows hailed from Venus).
Also found on board the disabled saucers were a tiny radio which operated
on some unknown principle, some small disks of an unknown metal, a strange
fabric, and what appeared to be navigational booklets written in a pictorial type
of script.
Scully’s chief source of information on the crashed-saucer story was an old
friend, one Silas M. Newton, who got the story from a mysterious “Dr. Gee,”
identified in the book by Scully as “the top magnetic research specialist of the
United States.” It was said that Dr. Gee and seven other scientists were called in
by the U.S. Air Force to examine the spaceships and their contents. It was
never made quite clear why Mr. Newton, an oil man, filled the role as
spokesman for Dr. Gee. But no matter, the entire incident was exposed as a
hoax by True magazine in its September 1952 issue. An investigative reporter,
J. P. Cahn, traced Scully’s sources to the pair of culprits who made the whole
thing up.
Silas Newton, it turned out, had been involved in some other hanky-panky
having to do with fraudulent stock practices. Cahn was also able to trace the
identity of “Dr. Gee” to one Leo A. GeBauer, the proprietor of Western Radio
& Engineering Company, a radio and television parts supply house in Phoenix,
Arizona. Scully admitted to Cahn that Mr. GeBauer was indeed “Dr. Gee”; and
the book Behind the Flying Saucers was confirmed as a hoax.
In 1974, the Scully rumor was revived again by a professor Robert Carr,
who was at the time promoting a Flying Saucer Symposium to be held in
Tampa, Florida, on November 1-3 of that year. Carr stated at a press conference
that, according to his secret sources, the U.S. Air Force was hiding a downed
saucer and its twelve deceased occupants at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton,
Ohio. The professor, who reportedly taught mass communications at the
University of Southern Florida, said that an autopsy performed on one of the
“little men” revealed that its genes and chromosomes were compatible with
those of Earth women. To find out more, one could attend the symposium for
the nominal fee of $37.50.
The “little men” stories began surfacing again in 1978. In a lecture given by
veteran UFO researcher Leonard H. Stringfield, at the annual Mutual UFO
Network (MUFON) Symposium, this one held (appropriately enough) in
Dayton, Ohio, on July 29, he said that: “Now, for the first time, sufficient data
have been amassed to lend support to some of the old retrieval claims.” But the
“new” claims—which harken back to the late 1940s and early 1950s—are
essentially the same stories told over and over again: The site of the crashed
saucer is usually given as Arizona or New Mexico. The military somehow finds
out about it first and, under the strictest secrecy, recovers the undamaged craft
and its occupants. Top scientists are brought in, who pronounce the find
genuine and not of Earth. The descriptions of the occupants are also remarkably
consistent: They are small—from three to four feet tall—with a
disproportionately large head (with many intricate convolutions in the brain, of
course), grayish or tan skin tones, diminutive ears, nose, and mouth; the bodies
are hairless or nearly so and are attired in one-piece suits, sometimes with
skullcaps of World War I vintage.
In other words, they are patently naïve accounts, not befitting the most
unimaginative science fiction writer, and a virtual repeat of Scully’s false
claims. Stringfield himself admits: “I do not possess a single affidavit to prove
that any one of my informants has seen a retrieved craft or its occupants. I have
only their names and their testimony. Unfortunately, I cannot use these names.
Anonymity has been requested and will be respected.”
More recently other “witnesses” to various facets of flying saucer recovery
operations in the American southwest have told their tales. They still amount to
unsubstantiated stories, which prohibit further confirmation and are useless to
science. However, the infamous Scully hoax is quite enlightening. It
demonstrates beautifully the symbiotic relationship that exists between science
fact, science fiction, and modern mythology.
What originally inspired the Scully hoax was no doubt the 1947 Roswell
incident, in which an announcement was made by a U.S. Air Force
representative that a flying saucer had crashed in the New Mexico desert and
was recovered by the military. It took just a little imagination to embellish the
account, and presto: we have the ingredients of a modern myth.
Some years later we have a revival of the Roswell case (based on recent
“eyewitness” testimony—not accounts that were documented prior to 1950), an
alleged alien autopsy film, and reverse engineering at Area 51 of alien
technology from the saucers that were recovered and brought to the Roswell
base. The story elements are related to each other in a circular relationship that
is mutually supportive. If the later embellishments of the Roswell case—details
that did not surface prior to 1950—can be traced to the Scully hoax, it appears
that the Roswell case rests on a shaky foundation that is not only weak, but
fraudulent.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Cahn, J. P. “The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men,” True magazine (September 1952).
The MUFON UFO Journal (July 1978).
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The (SETI) The attempt to locate

intelligent civilizations that may exist elsewhere in the universe. SETI is not to
be confused with an uncritical or credulous belief in aliens. While the
overwhelming majority of scientists reject popular UFO-related claims that
alien visitors are surreptitiously visiting Earth, most scientists support SETI as
a worthwhile scientific enterprise.
The age of SETI began in 1960, at the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory (NRAO) in West Virginia, when Dr. Frank Drake carried out
Project Ozma, a search for intelligent signals at the twenty-one centimeter
wavelength of interstellar hydrogen. Using an eighty-five-foot radio telescope,
Project Ozma examined only two stars: Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti.
From 1972 to 1976, also at the NRAO, Dr. Benjamin M. Zuckerman and Dr.
Patrick Palmer continued this work, with Project Ozma II. The second Ozma
had the use of radio telescopes as large as three hundred feet in diameter,
gathering nearly twelve and a half times as much radio energy as an eighty-
five-foot dish. Where the first Ozma had just a single radio receiver, Ozma II
had 384, each one tuned to a slightly different wavelength (in the vicinity of the
target wavelength). Project Ozma examined only two stars, whereas Project
Ozma II examined seven hundred.
At Ohio State University, Dr. Robert S. Dixon began conducting a twenty-
four-hour, all-sky SETI survey in December of 1973, continuing until 1998
when the “Big Ear” radio telescope was dismantled. No attempt was made to
pre-select target stars in advance (the rotation of the Earth constantly sweeps
the ear of the radio telescope across the sky); hence, there were an average of
three favorable nearby stars being examined at any moment of the night or day.
The Ohio State project is planning to resume after new equipment can be
designed and built.
The Harvard SETI project, led by physics professor Paul Horowitz, began a
small-scale observing project in 1978 using the 1000-foot Arecibo radio
telescope in Puerto Rico. During the 1980s more sophisticated receivers were
built to search a greater number of simultaneous targets with greater sensitivity
and accuracy. By 1985, a millionchannel SETI radio array was on-line at
Harvard in Massachusetts. Since 1995, a billion-channel array has been in
operation, searching for possible alien transmissions.
The SETI Institute of Mountain View, California, was founded in 1984 to
“conduct scientific research and educational projects relevant to the nature,
prevalence, and distribution of life in the universe.” Among its directors is
SETI pioneer Frank Drake. It has been conducting a search project that targets
approximately one thousand sun-like stars using several different radio
telescopes in both the northern and southern hemispheres.
Between 1978 and 1994, NASA was given a limited amount of funding for
SETI programs. However, the project was unpopular with Congress, and
funding was cut off several times. Currently, all U.S. SETI projects are
privately financed; however, NASA’s efforts in the search for extraterrestrial
life are being stepped up dramatically at the present time.
Contrary to what some people suggest, UFO skepticism is not synonymous
with Earth chauvinism. Paradoxically, UFOlogists have largely been critics of
scientific SETI projects, while some of the best-known proponents of the idea
of SETI have been UFO skeptics, such as the late astronomer Carl Sagan.
Many UFOlogists, on the other hand, take a dim view of SETI, viewing it as a
competitor for resources that otherwise might be available to them. However,
the scientific community has almost unanimously supported the view that
unlike SETI, UFO beliefs are not based upon the kind of critical thinking that is
a part of the scientific method.
As of yet, no SETI project has turned up any solid evidence of any
extraterrestrial artificial radio source. A few radio “glitches”” have been
detected, but could not subsequently be confirmed, and were probably due to
terrestrial interference. While there is no way of knowing for certain when (or
if) the first detection of an alien civilization will take place, we would all do
well to keep in mind the tremendous obstacles to early success in the SETI
field.
Dr. Frank Drake has estimated that the total number of combinations of
wavelength, direction, bandwidth, and other parameters which must be
searched to find the first extraterrestrial signal is on the order of 1019 (1
followed by 19 zeroes). Assuming this estimate to be correct, it could take
more than three hundred billion years before we detect the first alien signal.
Fortunately, there are certain plausible SETI assumptions which, if correct,
might make this seemingly-hopeless undertaking less than totally futile. For
example, if all intelligent civilizations in the universe realized this problem and
adopted some “natural” wavelength—perhaps one related to the prominent
twenty-one-centimeter wavelength of interstellar hydrogen—our one-
combination-a-second search might find an alien civilization as often as once
every thirty years. Also, modern SETI receivers can search millions of channels
at the same time. Perhaps Drake’s estimates will turn out to have been overly
pessimistic as to the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy, the strength of
their radio signals, and the average distance between civilizations. On the other
hand, some astronomers believe that he may have been far too optimistic.
Perhaps we are located in a region where we have one or more interstellar
neighbors nearby—much closer than the average distance between civilizations
—or we may happen to reside in an exceptionally lonely corner of the universe.
In any case, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is certain to be a long,
tedious, and trying undertaking. It will require large commitments of capital,
manpower, and scientific expertise for an indefinite period of time, with no
guarantee of eventual success.
As SETI advances, a “counterrevolution” of SETI skeptics has likewise
gained ground in the scientific community. A controversial conference was held
at the University of Maryland in 1979. Participating were such well-known
SETI advocates and theorists as Ronald Bracewell, Sebastian Von Hoerner,
Benjamin Zuckerman, Patrick Palme, Freeman Dyson, and Michael
Papagiannis. The general theme of the conference was that, using space
colonies as giant, lumbering space-arks to spend centuries crossing interstellar
space, it should be possible for a single civilization to colonize the entire galaxy
in roughly ten million years—just a tiny fraction of the age of the galaxy. If
millions or billions of other civilizations far older than ours are supposedly out
there, why has not one of them progressed to this stage? The logical conclusion
would seem to be that it is because we are alone in the galaxy—perhaps even in
the universe. The most pessimistic of SETI skeptics, astronomer Michael Hart
of Trinity University, told the conference that even the most ridiculously
optimistic estimate of the occurrence of life in the universe yields far less than
one planet having life in each galaxy. In fact, Hart estimates, at most only one
galaxy in 1031 has even a single planet with life of any kind.
Astrophysicist Frank J. Tipler of Tulane University finds the “Where Are
They?” objection to extraterrestrials quite insurmountable, charging SETI
advocates with promoting unfalsifiable, and hence pseudoscientific,
hypotheses: “SETI will become a science—and hence be worth doing—only
when its proponents tell us exactly what will convince them that it is reasonable
to assume we are alone.”
Also weighing in with the SETI doubters were physicist James Trefil and the
late astrophysicist Thornton Page, who had taken a mildly pro-UFO stance
starting in the 1960s. In 2000, the book Rare Earth by scientists Peter Ward and
Donald C. Brownlee mustered new support for the SETI pessimists’ position.
They argue that recent scientific discoveries suggest that extrasolar planets are
generally subjected to far more meteoric bombardment, and far greater orbital
instability, than our Earth, making the Earth with its abundant and varied life
forms a cosmic rarity.
Today, thousands of individuals are participating in the SETI effort, using
their home computers. A number of sponsors including the Planetary Society,
the University of Califonia, and numerous high-tech companies have
established the SETI@home project. The software runs in the background like a
“screen saver” when your computer is idle, analyzing data from radio
telescopes downloaded over the Internet. Should anything unusual turn up,
scientists are alerted. This allows SETI researchers to use the resources of
thousands of individual computers for data analysis without cost.
Nobody knows when, or whether, the first evidence of extraterrestrial
intelligence will be discovered.
—ROBERT SHEAFFER
Secret Life (Simon and Schuster, 1993). Temple University history professor
David Jacobs believes aliens are here to exploit us in a program of genetic
alteration of our species that begins for abductees in childhood. He has
performed more than 325 hypnosis sessions with 60 abductees. From this
information Jacobs found a pattern of remarkably similar stories being told of
the abductees being subjected to the same mental and physical tests and
procedures by the aliens.
SETI Institute Founded on the initiative of Tom Pierson in 1984, the SETI
Institute is a non-profit organization that fosters research programs related to
the search for extraterrestrial life. It was originally set up in the time of the
NASA SETI program to minimize the amount of monies spent on overhead.
After the elimination of the NASA program in 1993, the SETI Institute became
the nexus of its privately-funded successors, as well as the home of related
research.
Today, the SETI Institute runs Project Phoenix, the most comprehensive
radio SETI search, and is engaged (with the University of California, Berkeley)
in constructing the Allen Telescope Array. In addition, it manages
approximately 40 other research projects dealing with such related topics as the
question of life in the solar system, the origin of terrestrial life and the nature of
cosmic biogenic materials. These latter projects are principally funded by the
National Science Foundation and NASA. The Institute also runs a
comprehensive program for education and outreach.
In 2001, the Chairman of the Board of the Institute was Frank Drake, and its
Chief Executive Officer was Tom Pierson. The Institute’s offices are in
Mountain View, California, approximately 40 miles south of San Francisco.
—SETH SHOSTAK
2035 Landings Drive

Address: Mountain View, CA 94043
U.S.A.
Web site: www.seti.org
shapes of UFOs It is essentially true what astronomer Donald Menzel wrote

in his 1963 book The World of Flying Saucers (co-authored with Lyle Boyd),
that “No two reports describe exactly the same kind of UFO.” A rare exception
is seen in the accompanying photographs. One photo was taken by a farmer,
Paul Trent, near McMinnville, Oregon, on May 11, 1950, and the other by a
pilot over Rouen, France, in the summer of 1954.
McMinnville above; Rouen below
Nevertheless, in spite of the great diversity of reports, some general patterns

have been noted with respect to UFO shapes. The disk shape is clearly the most
common, representing about 26 percent of all UFOs reported. Spheres account
for about 17 percent, and oval or elliptical shapes make up roughly 13 percent.
According to the U. S. Air Force Project Grudge Report of December 1949, the
basic types of shapes were broken down as follows:
(1) “The most numerous reports indicate daytime observation of metallic

disk-like objects roughly in diameter ten times their thickness.”
(2) “Rocket-like objects.”
(3) “Sharply defined luminous objects” appearing as lights at night.
An analysis of UFO cases by the National Investigations Committee on

Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), for the period of 1942 to the end of 1963, found
that the above pattern was “well established.”
Investigators for Project Blue Book later found it necessary to increase the
number of shape-descriptive terms for coding purposes. The following table
presents these shape terms and the percentage and number of UFO sightings
evaluated (by a panel of judges) to be of unknown nature with at least 95
percent certainty. These values represent UFO entries for the period 1947 to
1952 (Project Blue Book, Special Report No. 14, Air Technical Intelligence
Center, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, May 5, 1955).
Another source of UFO-shape terms is found in Jacques Vallée’s book,
Passport to Magonia (1969), from which a total of 891 cases was reviewed
(cases 32 through 923) for the period October 28, 1902, to November 22, 1968.
Four hundred and forty-five cases (49.9 percent) were found to possess a total
of 79 single words of phrases representing perceived shape.
(See also Haines, R. F., “UFO Appearance Recognition and Identification
Test Procedure,” UFO Phenomena, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1976.)
Still other shapes have been reported by eyewitnesses. Some of them are
listed here to further illustrate the extremely wide range of object-shape terms
people-feel they must refer to in order to describe what they perceived:
“arrowhead,” “ball,” “balloon,” “bird-like,” “cushion,” “dart,” “discus,” “dots,”
“dumbbell,” “globular,” “hamburger sandwich,” “jumbo jet (without wings),”
“oyster shell with ribbed structure,” “pea,” “pinpoint,” “rhomboid,” “Saturn
disk,” “smudge,” “tadpole,” “teardrop,” “triangle,” “water tank,” “wedge.”
Since around the mid-1980s, more boomerang and triangular-shaped objects
have been reported in ever-increasing numbers. The objects seem to display a
preponderance of straight edges and equally spaced circular sources of light on
their surfaces. As Fowler (1996, 1997) and others have made clear, ultra-large,
silent, three-sided (often dark) aerial objects have been appearing over much of
the globe. The debate continues over whether these triangular objects are of
terrestrial or extraterrestrial origin. Interestingly, stronger arguments can be
made on the extraterrestrial side.
Since it is a truism that a picture is worth a thousand “shape” words, what is
known about drawings of UFOs by eyewitnesses?
The illustrations that accompany this encyclopedia entry present eyewitness

drawings obtained from the open UFO literature and grouped into similar-shape
categories. Each drawing has been reduced to fit the available space without
appreciably changing the original line thickness, shadow, or other basic details;
all identifying labels, symbols, or markings were deleted, however.
It should be noted that photographs of alleged UFOs tend to correspond to
the drawings made by eyewitnesses. The reader may confirm this observation
for himself or herself.
Visual perception of an unexpected anomalous phenomenon is subject to
numerous kinds of transformations (e.g., deletions, distortions, additions)
which can, later, appear in a UFO drawing (see Haines, R. F., Observing UFOs,
1979; Wertheimer, M., in Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects,
1968). Also, there may well be cultural or symbolic correlations between
reported or drawn UFO shapes and the psychological state of the witness (see
Grinspoon and Persky, in UFO’S—A Scientific Debate, 1972; Jung, Flying
Saucers. A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1959). The apparent
symmetry of many UFO-shape drawings could have significance for those
interested in attempting to identify the true nature of the “core” of the UFO
phenomenon, and for those interested in perceptual and psychological factors
of eyewitnesses. Indeed, Carl Jung suggested (in Flying Saucers: A Modern
Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, 1959), regarding the round object, that
“...whether it be a disk or a sphere—we at once get an analogy with the symbol
of totality well known to all students of depth psychology, namely the
‘mandala’ (Sanskrit for ‘circle’). This is not by any means a new invention, for
it can be found in all epochs and in all places, always with the same meaning,
and reappears time and again, independently of tradition.”
In UFO sightings in which the phenomenon was larger than a point of light
(i.e., possessed apparent area), a perceived two- and three-dimensional shape
becomes one of the most prominent physical characteristics available for study.
Literally thousands of UFO eyewitness drawings, verbal descriptions, and
photographs of this nature are available. In order to properly evaluate the UFO-
shape data that is available, several useful operating principles must be adhered
to:
1) A clear distinction must be made, and maintained, between the physical

form (geometric configuration of boundaries) of the stimulus that produced
a UFO report or drawing and its associated perceived shape (see Bartley,
Principles of Perception, 1958).
2) Three-dimensional object forms can present a very large number of shapes
depending upon their orientation with respect to the observer and
illumination source(s) (see Haines, 1994; Wertheimer, 1968).
3) Eyewitness drawings can be useful for analysis and classification purposes
if they are obtained in the proper way (see Haines, Observing UFOS, 1979;
Shepard, in UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist, 1979).
4) It must not necessarily be assumed that UFO phenomena have to maintain a
fixed (rigid) physical form throughout a given sighting. Many cases are
available to document this principle. A corollary to this is that perceived
shape does not necessarily have to remain fixed throughout a given sighting
(e.g., see case #386 in Vallée’s Passport to Magonia, 1969).
Several useful references are available to the interested reader on the subject
of UFO shapes (Haines, “UFO Drawings by Witnesses and Non-witnesses: Is
There Something in Common?” in UFO Phenomena, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1977; Hall,
The UFO Evidence, 1964; Shepard, “Some psychologically oriented techniques
for the scientific investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena,” in Symposium
on Unidentified Flying Objects, U. S. House of Representatives, July 29, 1968;
and “Photographs of alleged UFOS,” Takanashi, Worldwide UFO Photos,
1977). There are also thousands of drawings of UFOs in the files of the U. S.
Air Force; which are now publicly available, and private UFO study groups in
many nations collect eyewitness drawings and photographs. This storehouse of
data provides the basis for the above summary of UFO shapes and for further
research which investigators may pursue.
Since the first version of this entry appeared in The Encyclopedia of UFOs
(1980), an intensive study of how children portray UFOs through drawings has
been conducted. (Kerth and Haines, 1992) Among the fascinating discoveries
was that older children tended to draw more complex shapes that are
increasingly wider than thick. Drawings of entities—particularly aliens—
peaked at age 8 to 10 years with a steady decline thereafter. Girls drew more
entities and attributed less hostile intent by them than boys. Such findings as
these suggest the existence of important sociological and psychological
precursors leading to unconscious UFO protosymbols.
—RICHARD F. HAINES
References
Bartley, S. Howard. Principles of Perception (Harper, 1958).
Fowler, O. The Flying Triangle Mystery (Phenomenon Research Association, 1996).
———. “Flying Triangle” UFO’s: The Continuing Story (Phenomenon Research Association, 1997).
Haines, Richard F., ed. UFO Phenomena and the Behavioral Scientist (The Scarecrow Press, 1979).
Haines, Richard F. Observing UFOs (Nelson-Hall, 1980).
———. Project Delta: A Study of Multiple UFOs (LDA Press, 1994).
Hall, Richard H., ed The UFO Evidence (NICAP, 1964).
Jung, Carl G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (Princeton University Press,
1978).
Kerth, Linda, and Haines, Richard F. “How Children Portray UFOs,” Journal of UFO Studies (1992).
Menzel, Donald H. and Lyle G. Boyd. The World of Flying Saucers (Doubleday, 1963).
Shepard, Roger N. “Some Psychologically Oriented Techniques for the Scientific Investigation of
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” in Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects, U.S. House of
Representatives, July 29, 1968 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia (Nelson-Hall, 1980).
Wertheimer, Michael. “Perceptual Problems” in Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, edited by
Daniel S. Gillmor (Bantam Books, 1969).
Drawings by Diane Prentice. Copyright © 1980 by Diane Prentice and Ronald D. Story
Copyright © 2001 by Robert Fairfax
Shaver mystery, The Also known as the “Shaver hoax,” this was a publishing
phenomenon created in 1945 by Raymond A. Palmer, then editor of Amazing
Stories (a science fiction pulp magazine) from letters the magazine received
from a paranoid schizophrenic by the name of Richard S. Shaver. The Shaver
mystery is significant because it spawned the modern myth of “flying
saucers”—two years prior to the first sighting wave, which occurred in June
1947. For this reason, Ray Palmer is considered by those who know their
history, as “the man who invented flying saucers.”
Just as other imaginative writers had done before him, Palmer took an idea
—a myth or speculation—and turned it into “reality.” For example: North
America’s “Bigfoot” was nothing more than an Indian legend until a zoologoist
named Ivan T. Sanderson began collecting contemporary sightings of the
creature in the early 1950s, publishing the reports in a series of popular
magazine articles. He turned the tall, hairy biped into a household word, just as
British author Rupert T. Gould rediscoved sea serpents in the 1930s and,
through his radio broadcasts, articles, and books, brought Loch Ness to the
attention of the world. Another writer named Vincent Gaddis originated the
Bermuda Triangle in his 1965 book, Invisible Horizons: Strange Mysteries of
the Sea. Sanderson and Charles Berlitz later added to the Triangle lore, and
rewriting their books became a cottage industry among hack writers in the
United States.
Charles Fort put bread on the table of generations of science fiction writers
when, in his 1931 book Lo!, he assembled the many reports of objects and
people strangely transposed in time and place, and coined the term
“teleportation.” And it took a politician named Ignatius Donnelly to revive lost
Atlantis and turn it into a popular subject. (Donnelly’s book, Atlantis, published
in 1882, set off a 50-year wave of Atlantean hysteria around the world.)
But the man responsible for the most well-known of all such modern myths
—flying saucers—has been largely forgotten. Before the first flying saucer was
sighted in 1947, he suggested the idea to the American public. Then he
converted UFO reports from what might have been a Silly Season phenomenon
into a subject, and kept that subject alive during periods of total public
disinterest.
Born in 1911, Ray Palmer suffered severe injuries that left him dwarfed in
stature and partially crippled. He had a difficult childhood because of his
infirmities and, like many isolated young men in those pre-television days, he
sought escape in “dime novels,” cheap magazines printed on coarse paper and
filled with lurid stories churned out by writers who were paid a penny a word.
He became an avid science fiction fan, and during the Great Depression of the
1930s he was active in the world of fandom—a world of mimeographed
fanzines and heavy correspondence. (Science fiction fandom still exists and is
very well organized with well-attended annual conventions and lavishly printed
fanzines, some of which are even issued weekly.) In 1930, he sold his first
science fiction story, and in 1933 he created the Jules Verne Prize Club which
gave out annual awards for the best achievements in sci-fi. A facile writer with
a robust imagination, Palmer was able to earn many pennies during the dark
days of the Depression, undoubtedly buoyed by his mischievous sense of
humor, a fortunate development motivated by his unfortunate physical
problems. Pain was his constant companion.
In 1938, the Ziff-Davis Publishing Company in Chicago purchased a dying
magazine titled Amazing Stories. It had been created in 1929 by the inestimable
Hugo Gernsback, who is generally acknowledged as the father of modern
science fiction. Gernsback, an electrical engineer, ran a small publishing empire
of magazines dealing with radio and technical subjects. (He also founded
Sexology, a magazine of softcore pornography disguised as science, which
enjoyed great success in a somewhat conservative era.) It was his practice to
sell—or even give away—a magazine when its circulation began to slip.
Although Amazing Stories was one of the first of its kind, its readership was
down to a mere 25,000 when Gernsback unloaded it on Ziff-Davis. Wil liam B.
Ziff decided to hand the editorial reins to the young science fiction buff from
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the age of 28, Palmer found his life’s work.
Expanding the pulp magazine to 200 pages (and as many as 250 pages in
some issues), Palmer deliberately tailored it to the tastes of teenaged boys. He
filled it with nonfiction features and filler items on science and pseudo-science
in addition to the usual formula short stories of BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters)
and beauteous maidens in distress. Many of the stories were written by Palmer
himself under a variety of pseudonyms such as Festus Pragnell and Thorton
Ayre, enabling him to supplement his meager salary by paying himself the
usual penny-a-word. His old cronies from fandom also contributed stories to
the magazine with a zeal that far surpassed their talents. In fact, of the dozen or
so science fiction magazines then being sold on the news-stands, Amazing
Stories easily ranks as the very worst of the lot. Its competitors, such as
Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Planet Stories and the venerable
Astounding (renamed Analog) employed skilled, experienced professional
writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and L. Ron Hubbard (who later
created Dianetics and founded Scientology). Amazing Stories was garbage in
comparison and hardcore sci-fi fans tended to sneer at it.
The magazine might have limped through the 1940s, largely ignored by
everyone, if not for a single incident. Howard Browne, a television writer who
served as Palmer’s associate editor in those days, recalls: “Early in the 1940s, a
letter came to us from Dick Shaver purporting to reveal the ‘truth’ about a race
of freaks called ‘deros,’ living under the surface of the earth. Ray Palmer read
it, handed it to me for comment. I read a third of it, and tossed it in the waste
basket. Ray, who loved to show his editors a trick or two about the business,
fished it out of the basket, ran it in Amazing, and a flood of mail poured in from
readers who insisted every word of it was true because they’d been plagued by
deros for years.” (Goulart, 1972)
Actually, Palmer had accidently tapped a huge, previously unrecognized
audience. Nearly every community has at least one person who complains
constantly to the local police that someone—usually a neighbor—is aiming a
terrible ray gun at their house or apartment. This ray, they claim, is ruining their
health, causing their plants to die, turning their bread moldy, making their hair
and teeth fall out, and broadcasting voices into their heads. Psychiatrists are
very familiar with these “ray” victims and relate the problem with paranoid
schizophrenia. (It is estimated there are about three million paranoid
schizophrenics in the United States, representing approximately 1 percent of
the population.)
For the most part, these paranoiacs are harmless and usually elderly.
Occasionally, however, the voices they hear urge them to perform destructive
acts, particularly arson. They are a distrustful lot, loners by nature, and very
suspicious of everyone, including the government and all figures of authority.
In earlier times, they thought they were hearing the voice of God and/or the
Devil. Today they often blame the CIA or space beings for their woes. They
naturally gravitate to eccentric causes and organizations which reflect their own
fears and insecurities, advocating bizarre political philosophies and reinforcing
their peculiar belief systems. Ray Palmer unintentionally gave thousands of
these people focus to their lives.
Shaver’s long, rambling letter claimed that while he was welding he heard
voices which explained to him how the underground deros were controlling life
on the surface of the Earth through the use of fiendish rays. Palmer rewrote the
letter, making a novelette out of it, and it was published in the March 1945
issue under the title: “I Remember Lemuria.”
Somehow the news of Shaver’s discovery quickly spread beyond science
fiction circles and people who had never before bought a pulp magazine were
rushing to their local newsstands. The demand for Amazing Stories far
exceeded the supply and Ziff-Davis had to divert paper supplies (there were
still wartime shortages) from other magazines so they could increase the press
run of AS.
“Palmer traveled to Pennsylvania to talk to Shaver,” Howard Brown later
recalled, and “found him sitting on reams of stuff he’d written about the deros,
bought every bit of it and con tracted for more. I thought it was the sickest crap
I’d run into. Palmer ran it and doubled the circulation of Amazing within four
months.”
By the end of 1945, Amazing Stories was selling 250,000 copies per month,
an amazing circulation for a science fiction pulp magazine. Palmer sat up late at
night rewriting Shaver’s material and writing other short stories about the deros
under pseudonyms. Thousands of letters poured into the office. Many of them
offered supporting “evidence” for the Shaver stories, describing strange objects
they had seen in the sky and strange encounters they had had with alien beings.
It seemed that many thousands of people were aware of the existence of some
distinctly nonterrestrial group in our midst. Paranoid fantasies were mixed with
tales that had the uncomfortable ring of truth. The “Letters-to-the-Editor”
section was the most interesting part of the publication. Here is a typical
contribution from the issue for June 1946:
Sirs:
I flew my last combat mission on May 26 [1945] when I was shot up

over Bassein and ditched my ship in Ramaree Roads off Chedubs Island. I
was missing five days. I requested leave at Kashmere [sic]. I and Capt.
(deleted by request) left Srinagar and went to Rudok then through the
Khese pass to the northern foothills of the Karakoram. We found what we
were looking for. We knew what we were searching for.
For heaven’s sake, drop the whole thing! You are playing with dynamite.
My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I
have two 9” scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the
cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect
silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don’t know. My friend
has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside. How
we don’t know. But we both believe we know more about the Shaver
Mystery than any other pair.
You can imagine my fright when I picked up my first copy of Amazing
Stories and see you splashing words about on the subject.
The identity of the author of this letter was withheld by request. Later
Palmer revealed his name: Fred Lee Crisman. He had inadvertently described
the effects of a laser beam—even though the laser wasn’t invented until years
later. Apparently Crisman was obsessed with deros and death rays long before
Kenneth Arnold sighted the “first” UFO in June 1947.
In September 1946, Amazing Stories published a short article by W.C.
Hefferlin, “Circle-Winged Plane,” describing experiments with a circular craft
in 1927 in San Francisco. Shaver’s (Palmer’s) contribution to that issue was a
30,000 word novelette, “Earth Slaves to Space,” dealing with spaceships that
regularly visited the Earth to kidnap humans and haul them away to some other
planet. Other stories described amnesia, an important element in the UFO
reports that still lay far in the future, and mysterious men who supposedly
served as agents for those unfriendly deros.
A letter from army lieutenant Ellis L. Lyon in the September 1946 issue
expressed concern over the psychological impact of the Shaver Mystery:
What I am worried about is that there are a few, and perhaps quite a large
number of readers who may accept this Shaver Mystery as being founded
on fact, even as Orson Welles put across his invasion from Mars, via radio
some years ago. It is, of course, impossible for the reader to sift out in your
“Discussions” and “Reader Comment” features, which are actually letters
from readers and which are credited to an Amazing Stories staff writer,
whipped up to keep alive interest in your fictional theories. However, if the
letters are generally the work of the readers, it is distressing to see the
reaction you have caused in their muddled brains. I refer to the letters from
people who have “seen” the exhaust trails of rocket ships or “felt” the
influence of radiations from underground sources.
Palmer assigned artists to make sketches of objects described by readers and

disk-shaped flying machines appeared on the covers of his magazine long
before June 1947. So we can note that a considerable number of people—
millions—were exposed to the flying saucer concept before the national news
media was even aware of it. Anyone who glanced at the magazines on a
newsstand and caught a glimpse of the saucers-adorned Amazing Stories cover
had the image implanted in his subconscious. In the course of the two years
between March 1945 and June 1947, millions of Americans had seen at least
one issue of Amazing Stories and were aware of the Shaver Mystery with all of
its bewildering implications. Many of these people were out studying the empty
skies in the hopes that they, like other Amazing Stories readers, might glimpse
something wondrous. World War II was over and some new excitement was
needed. Raymond Palmer was supplying it—much to the alarm of Lt. Lyon and
Fred Crisman.
Aside from Palmer’s readers, two other groups were ready to serve as cadre
for the believers. About 1,500 members of Tiffany Thayer’s Fortean Society
knew that weird aerial objects had been sighted throughout history and some of
them were convinced that this planet was under surveillance by beings from
another world. Tiffany Thayer was rigidly opposed to Franklin Roosevelt and
loudly proclaimed that almost everything was a government conspiracy, so his
Forteans were fully prepared to find new conspiracies hidden in the
forthcoming UFO mystery. They would become instant experts, willing to
educate the press and the public when the time came. The second group were
spiritualists and students of the occult headed by Dr. Meade Layne, who had
been chatting with the space people at seances through trance mediums and
Ouija boards. They knew the space ships were coming and were hardly
surprised when “ghost rockets” were reported over Europe in 1946. Combined,
these three groups represented a formidable segment of the population.
On June 24, 1947, Kenneth Arnold made his famous sighting of a group of
“flying saucers” over Mt. Rainier, and in Chicago, Ray Palmer watched in
astonishment as the newspaper clippings poured in from every state. The things
that he had been fabricating for his magazine were suddenly coming true!
For two weeks, the newspapers were filled with UFO reports. Then they
tapered off and the Forteans howled “Censorship!” and “Conspiracy!” But
dozens of magazine writers were busy compiling articles on this new subject
and their pieces would appear steadily during the next year. One man, who had
earned his living writing stories for the pulp magazines in the 1930s, saw the
situation as a chance to break into the “slicks” (better quality magazines printed
on glossy or “slick” paper). Although he was 44 years old at the time of Pearl
Harbor, he served as a captain in the Marines until he was in a plane accident.
Discharged as major (it was the practice to promote officers one grade when
they retired), he was trying to resume his writing career when Ralph Daigh, an
editor at True magazine, assigned him to investigate the flying saucer enigma.
Thus, at the age of 50, Donald E. Keyhoe entered Never-Never-Land. His
article, “Flying Saucers Are Real,” would cause a sensation, and Keyhoe would
become an instant UFO personality.
That same year, Palmer decided to put out an all-flying saucer issue of
Amazing Stories. Instead, the publisher demanded that he drop the whole
subject after, according to Palmer, two men in Air Force uniforms visited him.
Palmer decided to publish a magazine of his own. Enlisting the aid of Curtis
Fuller, editor of a flying magazine, and a few other friends, he put out the first
issue of Fate in the spring of 1948. A digest-sized magazine printed on the
cheapest paper, Fate was as poorly edited as Amazing Stories and had no
impact on the reading public. But it was the only newsstand periodical that
carried UFO reports in every issue. The Amazing Stories readership supported
the early issues wholeheartedly.
In the fall of 1948, the first flying saucer convention was held at the Labor
Temple on 14th Street in New York City. Attended by about thirty people, most
of whom were clutching the latest issue of Fate, the meeting quickly dissolved
into a shouting match. Although the flying saucer mystery was only a year old,
the side issues of government conspiracy and censorship already dominated the
situation because of their strong emotional appeal. The U.S. Air Force had been
sullenly silent throughout 1948 while, unbeknownst to the UFO advocates, the
boys at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio were making a sincere effort
to untangle the mystery.
When the Air Force investigation failed to turn up any tangible evidence
(even though the investigators accepted the extraterrestrial theory) General
Hoyt Vandenburg, Chief of the Air Force and former head of the CIA, ordered
a negative report to release to the public. The result was Project Grudge,
hundreds of pages of irrelevant nonsense that was unveiled around the time
True magazine printed Keyhoe’s pro-UFO article. Keyhoe took this personally,
even though his article was largely a rehash of Fort’s books, and Ralph Daigh
had decided to go with the extraterrestrial hypothesis because it seemed to be
the most commercially acceptable theory (that is, it would sell magazines).
Palmer’s relationship with Ziff-Davis was strained now that he was
publishing his own magazine. “When I took over from Palmer in 1949,”
Howard Browne said, “I put an abrupt end to the Shaver Mystery —writing off
over 7,000 dollars worth of scripts.”
Moving to Amherst, Wisconsin, Palmer set up his own printing plant and
eventually he printed many of those Shaver stories in his Hidden World series.
As it turned out, postwar inflation and the advent of television was killing the
pulp magazine market anyway. In the fall of 1949, hundreds of pulps suddenly
ceased publication, putting thousands of writers and editors out of work.
Amazing Stories has often changed hands since but is still being published, and
is still paying its writers a penny a word. For some reason known only to
himself, Palmer chose not to use his name in Fate. Instead, a fictitious “Robert
N. Webster” was listed as editor for many years. Palmer established another
magazine, Search, to compete with Fate. Search became a catch-all for inane
letters and occult articles that failed to meet Fate’s low standards.
The September 1948 Fantastic Stories included this illustration for a “factual” article about a
Russian peasant who had been “burned by a ray from a ship from another world.”
Although there was a brief revival of public and press interest in flying
saucers following the great wave of the summer of 1952, the subject largely
remained in the hands of cultists, cranks, teenagers, and housewives who
reproduced newspaper clippings in little mimeographed journals and looked up
to Palmer as their fearless leader.
In June, 1956, a major four-day symposium on UFOs was held in
Washington, D.C. It was unquestionably the most important UFO affair of the
1950s and was attended by leading military men, government officials and
industrialists. Men like William Lear, inventor of the Lear Jet, and assorted
generals, admirals and former CIA heads freely discussed the UFO “problem”
with the press. Notably absent were Ray Palmer and Donald Keyhoe. One of
the results of the meetings was the founding of the National Investigation
Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) by a physicist named Townsend
Brown. Although the symposium received extensive press coverage at the time,
it was subsequently censored out of UFO history by the UFO cultists
themselves—primarily because they had not participated in it.
The American public was aware of only two flying saucer personalities,
contactee George Adamski, a lovable rogue with a talent for obtaining
publicity, and Donald Keyhoe, a zealot who howled “Coverup!” and was
locked in mortal combat with Adamski for newspaper coverage. Since
Adamski was the more colorful (he had ridden a saucer to the moon), he was
usually awarded more attention. The press gave him the title of “astronomer”
(he lived in a house on Mount Palomar where a great telescope was in
operation), while Keyhoe attacked him as “the operator of a hamburger stand.”
Ray Palmer tried to remain aloof of the warring factions, so, naturally, some of
them turned against him.
The year 1957 was marked by several significant developments. There was
another major flying saucer wave. Townsend Brown’s NICAP floundered and
Keyhoe took it over. And Ray Palmer launched a new newsstand publication
called Flying Saucers From Other Worlds. In the early issues he hinted that he
knew some important “secret.” After tantalizing his readers for months, he
finally revealed that UFOs came from the center of the Earth and the phrase
From Other Worlds was dropped from the title. His readers were variously
enthralled, appalled, and galled by the revelation.
For seven years, from 1957 to 1964, UFOlogy in the United States was in
total limbo. This was the Dark Age. Keyhoe and NICAP were buried in
Washington, vainly tilting at windmills and trying to initiate a congressional
investigation into the UFO situation.
A few hundred UFO believers clustered around Coral Lorenzen’s Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). And about 2,000 teenagers bought
Flying Saucers from newsstands each month. Palmer devoted much space to
UFO clubs, information exchanges, and letters-to-the-editor. So it was Palmer,
and Palmer alone, who kept the subject alive during the Dark Age and lured
new youngsters into UFOlogy. He published his strange books about deros, and
ran a mail-order business selling the UFO books that had been published after
the various waves of the 1950s. His partners in the Fate venture bought him
out, so he was able to devote his full time to his UFO enterprises.
Palmer had set up a system similar to sci-fi fandom, but with himself as the
nucleus. He had come a long way since his early days and the Jules Verne Prize
Club. He had been instrumental in inventing a whole system of belief, a frame
of reference—the magical world of Shaverism and flying saucers—and he had
set himself up as the king of that world. Once the belief system had been set up,
it became self-perpetuating. The people beleaguered by mysterious rays were
joined by the wishful thinkers who hoped that living, compassionate beings
existed out there beyond the stars. They didn’t need any real evidence. The
belief itself was enough to sustain them.
When a massive new UFO wave —the biggest one in U.S. history—struck
in 1964 and continued unabated until 1968, APRO and NICAP were caught
unawares and unprepared to deal with renewed public interest. Palmer
increased the press run of Flying Saucers and reached out to a new audience.
Then, in the 1970s, a new Dark Age began. October 1973 produced a flurry of
well-publicized reports and then the doldrums set in. NICAP strangled in its
own confusion and dissolved in a puddle of apathy, along with scores of lesser
UFO organizations. Donald Keyhoe went into seclusion before he died in 1988.
Most of the hopeful contactees and UFO investigators of the 1940s and 50s
have also passed away. Palmer’s Flying Saucers quietly self-destructed in 1975,
but he continued with Search until his death in the summer of 1977. Richard
Shaver is gone but the Shaver Mystery still has a few adherents. Yet the sad
truth is that none of this might have come about if Howard Browne hadn’t
scoffed at that letter in that dingy editorial office in that faraway city so long
ago.
—JOHN A. KEEL
References
Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (Arlington House, 1972).
Keel, John A. “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers,” Fortean Times ( 1983)
Wentworth, Jim. Giants in the Earth: The Amazing Story of Ray Palmer, Oahspe and the Shaver Mystery
(Palmer Publications, 1973).
Sheaffer, Robert M. (b. 1949). Robert Sheaffer is a leading skeptical

investigator of UFOs with a lifelong interest in astronomy, UFOs, and the
question of life on other worlds. He is a founding member of the Bay Area
Skeptics in California and the UFO Subcommittee of the Committee for the
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which
publishes The Skeptical Inquirer. Since 1977 he has written the “Psychic
Vibrations” column for that publication.
Mr. Sheaffer is the author of The UFO Verdict (1981), UFO Sightings
(1998), and has appeared on many radio and TV programs. His writings and
reviews have appeared in such diverse publications as Omni, Scientific
American, Spaceflight, Astronomy, The Humanist, Free Inquiry, Reason, and
others. He is a contributor to the book Extraterrestrials —Where Are They?
(Hart and Zuckerman, editors) and to The UFO Invasio, (Frazier, Karr, and
Nickell, editors). He authored the article on UFOs for Prometheus Book’s
Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, as well as for the Funk and Wagnalls
Encyclopedia.
Sheaffer has been an invited speaker at the Smithsonian UFO Symposium in
Washington, D.C., at the National UFO Conferences held in New York City
and in Phoenix, as well as at the First World Skeptics’ Congress in Buffalo,
New York. He works as a data communications software engineer in
California’s Silicon Valley, and sings tenor in professional opera productions.
P. O. Box 10441
Address: San Jose, CA 95157
U.S.A.
E-mail: robert@denunker.com
Web site: www.debunker.com
POSITION STATEMENT: Judging from the writings of well-known, supposedly

serious UFO researchers, the UFO phenomenon would appear to be truly
massive in scope. Polls show that millions of individuals believe that they have
sighted UFOs. More than a thousand supposed “UFO landings” have been
catalogued, indicated by effects such as markings on the ground, or broken
sticks. There are thousands if not millions of cases in which individuals say that
they have had actual encounters with UFO occupants, the famed “Close
Encounters of the Third Kind.” In many of these cases the individuals report
having been taken aboard the UFO against their will, where they were subjected
to various unpleasant medical “examinations” or “procedures.”
Yet where is all of the evidence that would be left behind by an
unquestionably genuine phenomenon that was as widespread as UFOs
supposedly are? Where are the clear and unambiguous UFO photographs, taken
by independent photographers who had never met, and whose authenticity is
beyond question? Where are the supposed “physical traces” of UFO landings
that cannot also readily be attributed to terrestrial causes, such as ordinary
metal objects on the ground, or rings of fungus growth? Why do we never see
clear, distinct photos of alleged UFO landings, or UFO occupants? Why do we
not have countless thousands of instances of unambiguous radar trackings of
UFOs crisscrossing the country, the objects being followed from place to place
like so many migrating geese? FAA radar routinely tracks the positions of
airliners as they travel between cities; why are UFOs not tracked in the same
way? This persistent lack of tangible evidence strikes one as highly perplexing,
since UFOs reportedly are occasionally tracked on radar, and supposedly are
photographed on occasion. But in every single UFO incident on record, the
UFO has always managed to slip away before the evidence of its existence
became fully convincing. What remarkably secretive behavior! And it is even
more astonishing that UFOs have apparently been able to avoid any
indisputable encounters with recording instruments, with 100% infallibility,
while reportedly permitting themselves to be seen by many millions of
observers worldwide, over a period of more than fifty years. There is only one
satisfactory explanation for this paradox: UFOs, as a phenomenon separate and
distinct from all phenomena, simply do not exist.
While there are many proponents of UFOs who choose to portray the current
status of the UFO field as that of a fledgling protoscience, soon to become a
recognized scientific field, such a view is naively optimistic. The chief obstacle
to scientific recognition of UFO studies is that UFOlogists do not behave like
real scientists. Instead of cooperating in UFO research and investigation,
UFOlogy remains largely divided into many small rival factions. Each is
convinced that it alone is qualified to conduct “scientific” UFO investigations,
regarding other groups as either “crackpots,” or else as too unimaginative and
timid. Instead of encouraging the presentation of dissenting views, UFO buffs
will go to almost any lengths to keep unwelcome views under wraps. Skeptical
views are largely excluded from the major UFO publications, except in
cartoon-parody form. Even UFO proponents who present findings critical of
some particular “classic” UFO case typically find themselves reviled or
ignored. In some cases researchers have even been ejected from the
organization in which they have long labored for the “crime” of discovering
major flaws in a case that that organization’s leadership has privately decided
must be defended in order to keep up interest among the membership. These
organizations then claim that they are building the “new science” of UFOs!
Of course, if UFOlogy were actually a scientific movement, it would
welcome any and all critics who can successfully sweep aside bogus
“evidence,” to better enable its “genuine” evidence, if any, to shine forth.
Apparently the UFO proponents themselves realize that their “evidence” is so
shallow that it cannot stand up to critical scrutiny.
Hence, despite the lofty pronouncements of those who claim that they are
building a “science” of UFOlogy, all we find are tightly-knit little sects
wrapping themselves in the mantle of science. In genuine science, research
tending to promote opposing views is actively encouraged, not systematically
excluded, as is done by today’s UFO groups. There will be no “science” of
UFOlogy until the UFO proponents start to behave like scientists, until they
learn to face up to disconfirming facts instead of pretending that they don’t
exist. Scientists understand that they must always spell out how the theories
that they promote might, in principle, be falsified, which UFOlogists are never
willing to do. Einstein clearly stated the observational results that, if obtained,
would suffice to falsify his Theory of Relativity. But no UFOlogist is willing to
state how we could ever establish, at least in principle, that UFOs are not
extraterrestrial visitors (or something even more bizzare).
In short, the current status of the UFO problem is that no progress has been
made in more than fifty years toward anything that can be called a science, and
nothing promising is on the horizon. In fact, the quality of research in the UFO
field is clearly moving backwards, in the direction of greater gullibility: a
credulity explosion has been going on for decades. At any given time,
mainstream UFOlogists are willing to accept claims and stories that just a few
years earlier would have been dismissed as outlandish. UFOlogy will remain in
the shadow-world of pseudoscience until its practitioners begin to act like real
scientists. But I suspect that will never happen, because the leading UFOlogists
appear to instinctively understand that if they were to begin to live up to the
standards and practices of true science, their treasured “UFO evidence” would
slowly melt away like a snowman in the sun.
UFOs are what I term a jealous phenomenon, always managing to slip away
before the evidence becomes too convincing. (For a detailed explanation of
what a jealous phenomenon is, see my book UFO Sightings.) Because of the
UFOs’ amazing success—if they are real - at evading unambiguous detection,
the conclusion seems inevitable that the UFO phenomenon consists of nothing
more than misperceptions, hoaxes, and hysteria. While there are many objects
in the sky that can be and often are misperceived as UFOs, the extraterrestrial
spacecraft of modern folklore exist only in the overheated imaginations of the
UFO sighters and investigators. UFOs will continue to play peek-a-boo with
the universe of objective reality for decades on end, for as long as there is
anyone willing to show them proper attention. When its supporters finally tire
of it and move on to something else, as did the believers in alchemy and spirit-
rapping, the UFO phenomenon will fall into oblivion. But for the foreseeable
future, the steady stream of movies and TV pseudo-documentaries will serve to
keep the public’s interest in extraterrestrial visitors at a fever pitch.
—ROBERT SHEAFFER
Shostak, G. Seth (b. 1943). A radio astronomer who has worked for the SETI
Institute since 1991, Seth Shostak is well known for his public lectures and
writings on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He received his B.A. in
physics (1965) from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. in astrophysics (1972)
from the California Institute of Technology. His doctoral dissertation concerned
the dynamics of nearby spiral nebulae as inferred from radio mapping of the 21
cm line, and this was among the first investigations to show the excess rotation
—and implied dark matter—in the outer regions of galaxies.
Seth Shostak
Dr. Shostak worked for more than a decade at the Kapteyn Astronomical
Institute, in The Netherlands, and in 1982—together with Jill Tarter—
conducted one of the few SETI experiments to be undertaken on the continent.
At the SETI Institute, Shostak has participated in Project Phoenix, a highly
sensitive scrutiny of nearby star systems for microwave transmissions, and has
led the Institute’s efforts to bring the excitement of SETI research to the public.
He has edited several confererence proceedings on SETI, contributed to a half-
dozen popular books, and penned the popular science volume Sharing the
Universe: Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life (1998). He is the author of
approximately 200 published articles on astronomy and SETI.
c/o SETI Institute

2035 Landings Drive
Address:
Mountain View, CA 94043
U.S.A.
E-mail: seth@seti.org

POSITION STATEMENT: The belief that UFOs have an extraterrestrial
connection is persistent and widespread. Polls taken since the early 1960s
consistently show that roughly half the American populace is con vinced that
alien spacecraft are buzzing the landscape. At the SETI Institute, I regularly
receive calls and other communications from people who have witnessed
something that they interpret as confirming this belief. However, while such
claims are clearly sincere, I’ve yet to hear of any evidence that would withstand
the most rudimentary scrutiny. One can be open to the idea of visiting aliens, in
the same way that one can be open to the idea of ghosts (also believed to exist by
a sizeable fraction of the populace). But being open to the idea hardly serves to
augment its chances for being true. What I find appealing about SETI is that,
unlike the UFO phenomenon, a claim that we had found evidence of
extraterrestrials would be verifiable by anyone with a radio telescope. The proof
would be fixed in the sky, and not simply flitting across it for the momentary
amazement of a few lucky viewers. It is my expectation that a confirmed SETI
detection, by its obvious reality and its promise of additional information, would
suddenly make a half-century of UFO sightings rather uninteresting.
—G. SETH SHOSTAK
Sirius mystery, The In 1976, Robert K. G. Temple received wide attention for
his book The Sirius Mystery, which claimed to present evidence of
extraterrestrial visitations to Earth some 5000 years ago. It even attained the
status of a semi-scientific work, as many were impressed with the scientific-
looking train of logic of the book. Temple stated that the Dogon, a tribe in
Africa, possessed extraordinary knowledge of the star system Sirius, the
brightest star in the sky; the star which became the marker of an important
ancient Egyptian calendar; the star which according to some is at the centre of
beliefs held by the Freemasons; the star which according to some is where the
forefathers of the human race might have come from.
Temple claimed that the Dogon possessed knowledge of Sirius B and Sirius
C, companion stars to Sirius that are, however, invisible to the naked eye. How
did the Dogon know about their existence? Temple referred to legends of a
mythical creature “Oannes,” who might have been an extraterrestrial being
descending to Earth from the stars, to bring wisdom to our forefathers. In 1998,
Temple republished the book with the subtitle “New Scientific Evidence of
Alien Contact 5,000 years ago”.
Sirius B is the small dot to the lower-right of the bright star Sirius.
The book’s glory came crashing down in the summer of 1999, when Lynn
Picknett and Clive Prince published The Stargate Conspiracy. That book stated
Temple had been highly influenced in his thinking by his mentor, Arthur M.
Young. Young was a fervent believer in “the Council of Nine,” a group of
channelled entities who claim they are the nine creator gods of ancient Egypt.
“The Nine” are part of the UFO and New Age and many claim to be in contact
with them. “The Nine” also claim to be extraterrestrial beings, from the star
Sirius.
In 1952, Young was one of the nine people present during the “first contact”
with the Council, where contact was initiated by Andrija Puharich, the man
who brought the Israeli spoonbender and presumed psychic Uri Geller to
America. It was Young who, in 1965, gave Temple a French article on the
secret star lore of the Dogon; an article written by Griaule and Dieterlen.
In 1966, Temple, at the impressionable age of twenty-one, became Secretary
of Young’s Foundation for the Study of Consciousness. In 1967, Temple began
work on what would eventually become The Sirius Mystery. As Picknett and
Prince have shown, Temple’s arguments are often based on erroneous readings
of encyclopaedic entries and misrepresentations of ancient Egyptian mythology.
They conclude that Temple very much wanted to please his mentor. It is,
however, a fact that the end result is indeed a book that would have pleased
Young and his beliefs in extraterrestrial beings from Sirius very much, whether
or not this was the intention of Temple.
Though Temple’s work is now therefore definitely challenged, the core of
the mystery remained intact. At the center of this enigma is the work of Marcel
Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, two French anthropologists, who wrote down
the secret knowledge on “Sirius B” and “Sirius C” in their book The Pale Fox.
But now, in another recent publication, Ancient Mysteries, by Peter James and
Nick Thorpe, this “mystery” is also uncloaked, as a hoax or a lie, perpetrated
by Griaule.
To recapitulate, Griaule was initiated in the secret mysteries of the male
Dogon, who allegedly told him the secrets of Sirius’ invisible companions.
Sirius (sigu tolo in their language) had two star companions. This was revealed
in an article that was published by Griaule and Dieterlen in the French language
in 1950.
In the 1930s, when their research occurred, Sirius B was known to have
existed, even though it was only photographed in 1970. There was little if no
possibility that the Dogon had learned this knowledge from Westerners that had
visited them prior to Griaule and Dieterlen.
Griaule and Dieterlen published their findings on the Sirius companions
without any reference or comment on how extraordinary the Dogon knowledge
was. It would be others, particularly Temple in the sixties and seventies, who
would zoom in on that aspect. To quote Ancient Mysteries: “While Temple,
following Griaule, assumes that to polo is the invisible star Sirius B, the Dogon
themselves, as reported by Griaule, say something quite different.” To quote the
Dogon: “When Digitaria (to polo) is close to Sirius, the latter becomes brighter;
when it is at its most distant from Sirius, Digitaria gives off a twinkling effect,
suggesting several stars to the observer.” James and Thorpe wonder—as
anyone reading this should do—whether to polo is therefore an ordinary star
near Sirius, not an invisible companion, as Griaule and Temple suggest.
The biggest challenge to Griaule, however, came from anthropologist Walter
Van Beek. He points out that Griaule and Dieterlen stand alone in the world in
their claims on the secrets of the Dogon. No other anthropologist supports their
opinion or claims.
In 1991, Van Beek led a team of anthropologists who declared that they
could find absolutely no trace of the detailed Sirius lore reported by the French
anthropologists. James and Thorpe understate the problem when they say that
“this is very worrying”.
Griaule had stated that about 15 percent of the Dogon tribe knew about this
secret knowledge, but Van Beek could, in a decade of research with the Dogon,
find not a single trace of this knowledge. Van Beek was initially keen to find
evidence for Griaule’s claims, but had to admit that there may have been a
major problem with Griaule’s claims.
Even more worrying is Griaule’s background. Though an anthropologist,
Griaule was interested in astronomy, which he had studied in Paris. As James
and Thorpe point out, he took star maps along with him on his field trips as a
way of prompting his informants to divulge their knowledge of the stars.
Griaule himself was aware of the discovery of Sirius B and it is quite likely that
he overinterpreted the Dogon responses to his questions. In the 1920s, before
Griaule went to the Dogon, there were also unconfirmed sightings of Sirius C.
Was Griaule told by his informants what he wanted to believe? It seems, alas,
that the truth is even worse, at least for Griaule’s reputation.
Van Beek actually spoke to the original informants of Griaule, who stated:
“though they do speak about sigu tolo [interpreted by Griaule as their name for
Sirius], they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for
some, it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the sigu [festival], for
another it is Venus that through a different position appears as sigu tolo. All
agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule.”
So whatever knowledge they possessed, it was knowledge coming from
Griaule, not knowledge native to the Dogon tribe. Van Beek also discovered
that the Dogon are of course aware of the brightest star in the sky, which they
do not, however, call sigu tolo, as Griaule claimed, but dana tolo. To quote
James and Thorpe: “As for Sirius B, only Griaule’s informants had ever heard
of it.”
With this, the Dogon mystery comes to a crashing halt. The Sirius Mystery
influenced more than twenty years of thinking about our possible ancestry from
“forefathers” who have come from the stars. In 1996, Temple was quick to
point out the new speculation in scientific circles on the possible existence of
Sirius C, which made the claims by Griaule even more spectacular and
accurate. But Temple was apparently not aware of Van Beek’s recent research.
With this new research of both Van Beek and the authors of Ancient Mysteries,
we uncover how Griaule himself was responsible for the creation of a modern
myth, which, in retrospect, has created such an industry and almost religious
belief that the scope and intensity can hardly be fathomed. Nigel Appleby, in
his withdrawn publication Hall of the Gods, which was, according to Appleby
himself, tremendously influenced by Temple’s book, Appleby spoke about how
Temple believed that present-day authorities were apparently unwilling to set
aside the blinkers of orthodoxy or were unable to admit the validity of anything
that lies outside their field or offers a challenge to its status quo. He further
wondered whether there was also a modern arrogance that could not
countenance the possible scientific superiority of earlier civilisations. It seems,
alas, that Griaule, a scientist, wanted to give earlier civilizations more
knowledge than they actually possessed. And various popular authors and
readers have since been led into a modern mythology: the “Age of the Dark
Sirius Companion.”
—FILIP COPPENS
Sitchin, Zecharia (b. 1922). Zecharia Sitchin is one of a small number of

orientalists who can read the Sumerian clay tablets which trace events from the
earliest times. Sitchin was born in Russia and grew up in Palestine, where he
acquired a profound knowledge of Semitic and European languages, of the Old
Testament, and the history and archaeology of the Near East.
Zecharia Sitchin
He graduated from the University of London, majoring in Economic
History, having attended the London School of Economics and Political
Science. After a writing career as a journalist, he began writing “The Earth
Chronicles”—a series of books that combine the latest scientific discoveries
with textual and pictorial evidence from antiquity to form a cohesive and fact-
based record of what had really happened on our planet in the past 450,000
years—a tale of visitors to Earth from another planet who created mankind
through genetic engineering and shared with mankind more and more of their
knowledge and technology. In that record of the Past, Sitchin sees clues to our
future.
Zecharia Sitchin is a member of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Oriental Society (AOS), the
Middle East Studies Association of North America, and the Israel Exploration
Society (IES), He was the recipient of the 1996 “Scientist of the Year Award”
by the International Forum on New Science.
He has been featured on numerous television and radio programs and written
about in journals, magazines, and daily newspapers around the globe.
His books, which have been translated into fourteen languages, include: The
th
12 Planet (1976), The Stairway to Heaven (1980), The Wars of Gods and Men
(1985), The Lost Realms (1990), Genesis Revisited (1990), When Time Began
(1993), Divine Encounters (1996), and The Cosmic Code (1999).
P. O. Box 577
Address: New York, NY 10185
U.S.A.
Web site: www.sitchin.com
POSITION STATEMENT: I was fortunate to have studied the Old Testament in

its original Hebrew language—fortunate because all translations are in reality
interpretations. An incident from my school days will illustrate what I mean:
We reached chapter six of Genesis, which tells the story of the Deluge; but it
precedes the tale with seven enigmatic verses that describe the events preceding
the Deluge, for those were the days when the “giants” took the daughters of
Adam as wives and had children by them. And I raised my hand and asked the
teacher why he renders the verse as “giants” when the word the Bible uses is
Nefilim—which does not mean giants at all, but “those who had come down,”
and in context from heaven to Earth. Instead of being complimented for my
linguistic acumen, I was reprimanded for “questioning the Bible.”
Who were the Nefilim? The exchange with the teacher raised this question
in my mind to an encompassing obsession. The Bible described them in the
same Genesis verses as the “sons of the gods” (plural!)—odd in a Bible
devoted to monotheism. It also stated that they were part of the Anakim (a term
taken to mean “giants”); but who were the Anakim? Studies of ancient Near
Eastern languages, civilizations, and archaeological discoveries confirmed that
the seven enigmatic verses were a remnant from a pre-biblical “myth.” Indeed,
the whole tale of the Deluge has been found written on clay tablets, in a script
called cuneiform, millennia before the Hebrew Bible was composed. In fact,
the whole tale of Creation in Genesis was based on a much longer
Mesopotamian tale written on seven tablets. And in time it became evident that
the answers to the questions, “Who were the Nefilim? and “Who were the
Anakim?” were to be found in the excavated records of the first known
civilization—the Sumerians—which blossomed out in what is now Iraq some
6,000 years ago.
In their writings the Sumerians referred to their gods as Anunnaki, literally
meaning “those who from heaven to Earth came”—clearly, the biblical Anakim
—and stated that they had come to Earth from another planet called Nibiru. The
texts are considered to be “myths” by the archaeologists and scholars who have
found, deciphered, and translated them; but what if they are true and factual
records of the past? They are too numerous, too detailed, too full of
sophisticated technological and scientific knowledge, to have been the product
of imaginative primitives; and they are accompanied by thousands of pictorial
depictions—not only of the Anunnaki, but also of their space and aerial craft,
the UFOs of antiquity.
But if all those tales were factual, what planet was Nibiru? It took additional
decades of research and study, of both ancient and modern astronomy, to reach
a startling conclusion: There is one more planet in our solar system, a post-
Plutonian planet with a large elliptical orbit that brings it to our vicinity
(passing between Mars and Jupiter) every 3,600 Earth-years; it is then that the
comings and goings between Nibiru and Earth take place.
I have put together the textual, pictorial and scientific evidence in eight
books, six of which make up “The Earth Chronicles” series. In the quarter of a
century since my first book (The 12th Planet) was published in 1976, every
new discovery in astronomy, geology, biology, genetics, computer sciences,
etc., has corroborated the ancient data. There is thus no doubt in my mind that
not only are we not alone in the universe, but we are not alone in our own solar
system.
The “UFO enigma” is but a modern version of what people in antiquity had
seen, witnessed, and recorded. As a Vatican theologian, Monsignor Corrado
Balducci agreed with me at a public dialogue in Italy in April 2000
—“Extraterrestrials” exist; we are only catching up with their knowledge.
—ZECHARIA SITCHIN
Situation Red: The UFO Siege (Doubleday, 1977). Leonard Stringfield

became the first author to draw connections between reports of cattle
mutilations, Bigfoot sightings, phantom helicopters, and UFOs. He believes
extraterrestrial visitors are behind these phenomena and may possess psychic
powers to manipulate witnesses into trances as a way of disguising their true
reasons for visiting Earth.
Sky People, The (Neville Spearman, 1960). Brinsley LePoer Trench details
examples of how diverse human cultures preserve legends of space visitors who
used genetic engineering to create geniuses and prophets. By reinterpreting the
Bible he concludes that the Garden of Eden once existed on the planet Mars, and
that Noah built a great ark—or spaceship—to escape a flood, which destroyed
the Martian civilization. Survivors fled to Earth, and we are now under a galactic
quarantine imposed by the more advanced Sky People.
sleep paralysis Sleep paralysis as defined by Dr. David J. Hufford is “a period

of inability to perform voluntary movements, either when falling asleep or
when awakening, accompanied by conscious awareness. This condition has
been ascribed both to hypnagogic and hypnopompic states.” (Hufford, 1982)
Hypnagogic hallucinations, often accompanied by the belief that something,
or someone, is in the room, occur as the person is falling asleep. Hypnopompic
hallucinations occur upon waking and can contain the same horrifying imagery
found in hypnagogic hallucinations. These images and imaginary experiences
can be completely recalled afterwards.
Hufford, as well as other researchers, learned that sleep paralysis is fairly
common in the general population. As many as 15 percent of those surveyed
claimed to have experienced an episode of sleep paralysis. Hufford wrote that
“the entire experience seems to be common, as well as too consistently
patterned to be pathognomic.” (Hufford, 1982)
What Hufford was suggesting was that his own research had suggested that a
significant part of the general population had experienced some form of sleep
paralysis and/or a hypnagogic hallucination. Most people, however, were
unfamiliar with sleep paralysis and began to search for an explanation for their
experiences in other arenas. One of those arenas was that of alien abduction.
Dr. David Jacobs described in his book, Secret Life (1992), what he
considered to be the classic abduction scenario. Of that typical abduction, he
wrote: “An unsuspecting woman is in her room preparing go to bed. She gets
into bed, reads a while, turns off the light, and drifts off into a peaceful night’s
sleep. In the middle of the night she turns over and lies on her back. She is
awakened by a light that seems to be glowing in her room. The light moves
toward her and takes the shape of a small ‘man’ with bald head and huge black
eyes. She is terrified. She wants to run but she cannot move. She wants to
scream but she cannot speak. The ‘man’ moves toward her and looks deeply
into her eyes. Suddenly she is calmer, and she ‘knows’ that the ‘man’ is not
going to hurt her.” (Jacobs, 1992)
Although unaware of it, Jacobs has defined, in that paragraph, classic sleep
paralysis. He might have accidentally explained the event that causes some to
believe they have been abducted.
It has been estimated by some researchers that as many as 50 percent of the
alien abduction cases can be explained as sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is
now better un derstood because of the research done in the last twenty years.
And because of that research, a cause for some abduction cases has been found.
Please note that it is a cause for some abductions, but certainly cannot explain
all of them.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
References
Hufford, David J. The Terror That Comes in the Night (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982).
Randle, Kevin D., Estes, Russ, and Cone, William P. The Abduction Enigma (Forge, 1999).
Socorro (New Mexico) landing One of the most highly-publicized physical-

trace cases of all time is the Socorro, New Mexico, “landing,” which allegedly
occurred on April 24, 1964. The case is considered by many UFOlogists to be
one of the “best” because of the combination of factors that make it interesting.
It has abundant detail and was reported by an apparently credible, reliable
witness. It is also listed in Blue Book files as “unexplained.”
Eyewitness sketch of the Socorro object
According to the story, as Officer Lonnie Zamora (a five-year veteran with

the Socorro Police Department) was chasing a speeder down South Park Street.
(The time was reported as 5:45 P.M. MST) The speeder wound up on a dead-end
street and Zamora stopped his patrol car to wait. Just then, Zamora was startled
to hear a loud “roar” whereupon he saw a bluish-orange flame, conical in shape
(narrower at the top), slowly descending in an unpopulated area to the
southwest. (Zamora was, at this point, 4,000 feet away from the site where he
later found the imprints of the UFO.)
Landing scene near Socorro, as depicted by APRO artist Norman Duke
Hearing a loud sound and knowing that a dynamite-storage shed was located
in the approximate vicinity of the bright flame, Zamora first thought that
someone might be “fooling around” over there. As the flame disappeared
behind a small hill, he forgot about the speeder and headed toward whatever
was causing the disturbance in the other direction.
Zamora began to see something when he came to the top of a small mesa (about
800 feet from the landed object). At first, all that he could see appeared to be an
overturned car, down in the gully, and two “small kids” standing next to it. He
was quoted by Look magazine as saying: “All I could see from that far away was
what looked like two sets of white coveralls beside the object. I couldn’t see any
features, just two figures in the distance. It was like two sets of coveralls hanging
on a washline, that’s all. They looked about four feet high.”
He tried to drive his car to a better vantage point and, in doing so,
temporarily lost sight of the object. When he saw it again, the two figures were
gone, and suddenly a deafening roar again filled the air. Zamora dived for cover
and was on the ground as the object rose into the air. It halted about twenty feet
off the ground and hovered motionless for a few seconds before flying away
horizontally. (its speed was later estimated to be around 120 miles per hour.)
Alleged markings on the object as sketched by the witness, Lonnie Zamora
While the object was hovering, Zamora saw some red markings on its side,
which he described as “... a crescent with a vertical arrow pointed upward
inside the crescent and a horizontal bar beneath that.” He tried to use his radio
but without success. Even though it was in perfect working order before, it now
ceased to function. After a few more tries it started working again, and Zamora
requested that Sergeant M. Samuel Chavez of the New Mexico State Police be
sent to the scene.
When Sergeant Chavez arrived, both he and Zamora went down in the
arroyo (gully), where the object had been seen, to investigate. They found eight
imprints in the ground—four large (averaging 10 by 18 inches) rectangular
indentations, apparently from the landing legs of the craft, and four smaller
round ones (thought by some to be points on the ground where a ladder had
been set, and reset). A mesquite bush and a small clump of grass smoldered
nearby. The following is quoted from the official Air Force report:
Sgt. Chavez was skeptical of the situation and proceeded to where

Zamora had observed the object. Here he found the marks and burns.
Smoke appeared to be coming from a bush which was burned but no flame
or coals were visible. Sergeant Chavez broke a limb from the bush and it
was cold to the touch. The marks were fresh and no other marks were in the
area. The burning seemed to be sporadic. Clumps of grass in close
proximity to the burned ones were not burned, while others just a short
distance away from the unburned ones were again burned, etc. Diagonals of
the four impressions (made by the legs of the object) intersect in a
perpendicular and the major distance is about 13 feet.
A closer USAF examination of the site on 29 April revealed a fair
amount of charred particles mixed in with the dirt, and some charred
cardboard was also found. Analysis of soil samples taken on the evening of
24 April was completed on 19 May. It included spectrographic analysis,
which revealed that there was no foreign material in the soil samples. Also,
no chemicals were detected in the charred or burned soil which would
indicate a type of propellant. There was no significant difference in
elemental composition between the different samples.
A check for radioactivity was made with a geiger counter at
approximately 4 P.M. on 26 April, with negative results. The counter was
checked against a watch dial and found to be in working order.
Although Zamora was the only witness to the actual sighting as he
described it, nine people in all saw the markings while they were still fresh.
According to Opel Grinder, Manager of Whitting Brothers’ Service
Station on Route 85 North, at least one other person, an unidentified tourist
traveling north on 85, saw the UFO just before it landed in the gully.
Grinder said the man stopped at the station and remarked that aircraft flew
low around there. Grinder replied that there were many helicopters in that
vicinity, and the tourist said, “it was a funny looking helicopter, if that’s
what it was.” The man said further that the object had flown over his car. It
actually was headed straight for the gully where it landed moments later.
The tourist also commented that he had seen a police car heading up the
hill. This was apparently Zamora’s car. (From El Defensor Chieftan,
Tuesday, 28 April 1964, and verified by a direct telephone call to Mr
Grinder. Note that this information implies that the UFO not only
disappeared in the direction of White Sands [Missile Range] but also came
from that same direction.)
The tourist who stopped at Grinder’s service station has apparently been
identified as Mr Larry Kratzner of Dubuque, Iowa. Kratzner and a friend, Mr
Paul Kies, traveling together at the time, were finally traced, through an old
newspaper clipping (from the 29 April 1964 Dubuque Telegraph-Herald) by
UFO researcher Ralph C. DeGraw, who published results of the belated
personal interviews—conducted in May 1978, fourteen years after the Socorro
incident—in his publication, The UFO Examiner.
DeGraw noted that the witnesses’ “descriptions of what they saw were
entirely different.” There were also significant discrepancies between the two
tourists’ testimony and that of Lonnie Zamora.
Agreeing that they were traveling east on Highway 60, approximately one
mile southwest of Socorro, at about 3 or 4 p.m. MST (at least one hour and
forty-five minutes earlier than the time given by Zamora of his first sighting of
the object), Kratzner, the driver, said he saw “a cloud of black smoke coming
from the ground ahead of them and to the right.” He was also reported to have
seen “a round saucer or egg-shaped object ascending vertically from the black
smoke.” He even described a row of four “windows” on the “craft” and a “red
Z” marking on the side facing them. After the vertical climb, Kratzner claimed
that the object leveled off and disappeared in the cloud of black smoke it was
producing, in the southwest.
Kies, on the other hand, reported seeing black smoke coming from the
ground (ahead of them, and slightly to the right) and a bright, shiny
“reflection,” which appeared to be within the smoke. Kies said he saw the shiny
reflection only on the ground, and saw nothing flying in the sky. He thought, at
the time, that the source of the smoke might have been a junkyard where
someone was burning tires and cutting up wrecked cars, and, perhaps, the
reflection was from a car window or part of a car body that had caught the sun.
(According to Zamora, there was no smoke, only dust, in the area.)
Both Kratzner and Kies estimated their position at the time of their
observations to be about one mile from where the black smoke was apparently
coming from. Neither of them heard any noise, even though, according to their
accounts, they were at about the same distance from the “object,” when first
sighted, as Zamora when he said that he heard a “very loud roar.”
An even greater discrepancy has been pointed out by the UFO debunker
Philip Klass. During his on-site investigation, in December 1966, Klass
interviewed a local resident, “Mr Felix Phillips, whose house is located only
one thousand feet south of the spot where the UFO allegedly landed. Phillips
said that he and his wife had been home at the time of the reported incident,
and that several windows and doors had been open—yet neither of them had
heard the loud roar that Zamora reported during the UFO landing and later
during take-off. This was especially curious because Zamora’s speeding car
was four thousand feet away from the site and the Phillips home was only one-
quarter this distance.”
Klass concluded (after fitting together several other key pieces of
information) that the “UFO landing” was a hoax intended to turn the
economically-depressed town of Socorro into a tourist attraction.
Nevertheless, many UFOlogists still consider the Socorro case a “classic,”
which was apparently taken seriously by the U.S. Air Force back in 1964.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
“Flying Saucers,” a Look magazine special by the editors of UPI and Cowles Communicatons (1967).
Klass, Philip J. UFOs Explained (Random House, 1974).
Phillips, Ted. “High Strangeness Ground Trace Reports,” The MUFON UFO Journal (December 1979).
———. “Landing Traces, Physical Evidence for the UFO” in the MUFON Symposium 1973 Proceedings
(MUFON, 1973).
Sorell (Australia) saucers Two men, who prefer to remain anonymous,

sighted three UFOs at Lake Sorell, in Tasmania, on February 26, 1975. The
reporting witness was a tail gunner in the Royal Australian Air Force, who later
became a professional man and is considered to be reliable. He and a friend (a
commercial artist) were camped on the skore of Lake Sorell to do some fishing.
At 8:45 P.M., Mr. “Smith” (a pseudonym for the reporting witness) noted
three “things” in the sky which he at first thought might have been aircraft. The
objects were approaching from the northeast and appeared to be two large craft
and a smaller one.
Underneath each of the craft was a red, pulsing light in the center and other
red-to-orange lights running around the circumference. The two objects stood
out clearly, and one of them headed toward the fishermen’s location.
Smith said, “It was about 2½ miles away when we saw it move, and then it
was right there only about a thousand yards away and five hundred feet above
the lake.” He said that if he had not seen it himself, he would not have believed
any craft could display such a performance. He was sure that the size of the
object was no less than two hundred feet in diameter.
During the next few minutes, the object turned on a “monstrous light” which
was directed down toward the lake. It was half the diameter of the UFO itself;
the shaft of it was well defined, and it came from one side of the bottom of the
UFO. The light was very intense, and it was painful to the eyes to look at.
Smith compared its brilliance to that of a welding torch. While watching the
phenomena, he took careful sightings on hills in the area with which he was
familiar. The spill of light from around the main shaft of the light illuminated a
distance of 1½ miles around the lake. The beam was swung back and forth in
an arc. “It seemed like a careful search of the Robinson’s Swamp area, and I
have no doubt that beam of light was intelligently controlled,” Smith said.
Artistist’s conception by Brian James
The two men had a large tent set up at the lakeside together with cover for
the car. The car’s radio was being used because a portable radio he had was not
strong enough to pick up radio stations some distance away. Smith observed
that when the UFO flew close to their campsite the car radio emitted a loud
“intense static noise.” Still watching the object, Smith traversed the radio dial
across the whole band; but he could not pick up one radio station. “There was
just the static,” he said.
After its “inspection” of the area, the UFO put out its gigantic light beam,
after which a blue-white phosphorescence was left hanging about thirty feet
above the lake’s surface. Once the light was out, the UFO was clearly seen; and
it departed “in a flash.” Its departing speed was tremendous, Smith said. and
watching it leave was “like watching a tracer bullet going away from you.” It
was accompanied by the other UFO, which had been hovering near Mount
Penney. When the two left, the time was 9:30 P.M. Smith and his friend made
sketches of what they had seen (redrawn for publication). The next day, Smith
and friend met some fishermen who had seen the UFO light up the lake the
night before. The anglers had been camped one mile away from Smith’s
location at Silver Plains. They told Smith they had been in their tent when
suddenly the tent was lit up inside like daylight.
Another sighting took place at Lake Sorell on March 14, 1975, when a Mr.
Knapek and his two sons and two friends sighted an object while camped in a
clearing one mile east of the lake. They were about to have a snack when the
children, ages thirteen and fifteen, pointed out an object rising slowly from
behind trees three hundred yards to the west toward the lake. The object, once
above the trees, rose rapidly and shot up into the southwestern sky diminishing
to star size and then being lost to view at 75 degrees elevation. The whole event
took only five seconds.
The object in this case was football-shaped and estimated by the witnesses
to be about fifty feet across. It was bright yellow underneath, with a lighter
yellow on top. As it moved away, the color became more white and much
brighter. No ground check was made for physical traces.
soul exchange This term describes the process of a “Walk-in” experience, in

which a human being agrees to vacate their own body-mind system, and allow
a second soul (often considered an ET spirit), to take their place and incarnate
directly into their voluntarily surrendered body and mind. It is claimed that this
is done by mutual agreement for the purpose of release for the departing soul,
and to provide an opportunity for greater world service for the entering soul.
This process is comparable but not identical to the process by which an “ET
Wanderer” comes to take birth in a human body.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Soul Samples (Wild Flower Press, 1999). This book, by psychologist R. Leo
Sprinkle, gives a psychological, psychical, and spiritual perspective on the
UFO phenomenon and its relationship to people’s lives. UFO author Keith
Thompson encapsulated Dr. Spinkle’s efforts by saying, “when other
investigators were chasing lights in the sky and gathering soil samples, you
[Leo] were helping UFO experiencers and gathering soul samples.”
Partly biographical in nature, this book reveals Dr. Sprinkle’s conclusions
and insights on the link between UFO/ET activities and the process of
reincarnation.
soul transfer This is a general term applicable to both “Wanderers” and
“Walk-ins”: individuals who claim to be ET souls living in human bodies.
While both claim to be ETs who freely chose to enter human incarnation, their
entry into the human system occurs through different modes of transfer.
Wanderers are those whose transfer was at birth, and continues for multiple
incarnations, while Walk-ins claim to enter human life in a soul exchange with
an adult. According to their metaphysics, ET souls are the vanguard of the
benevolent ET community, and are here to assist in human evolution.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Space Brothers An alternate term for benevolent extraterrestrial races, allied

in service to various planets and Earth humanity. Especially popularized in the
1950s by science fiction writers, UFO researchers, contactees, and channels.
Carl Jung called them “technological angels.”
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Space-Gods Revealed, The (Harper & Row, 1976). Ronald Story

demonstrates how proponents of the “ancient astronaut theory” (especially
Erich von Däniken) are guilty of absurdities, active imaginations, faulty
suppositions, and superficialities. As astronomer Carl Sagan writes in the
foreword to Story’s book: “The possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence is
something I and many other scientists take very seriously—to the point of using
large radio telescopes to listen for possible signals sent our way by beings on
planets of other stars. If there were good evidence that in the past we were
visited by such beings, our task would be made immeasurable easier. But
unfortunately there is no such evidence, as the present book helps to make
clear.”
Spaceships of Ezekiel, The (Econ-Verlagsgruppe, 1973) NASA engineer

Josef Blumrich reinterprets Ezekiel’s vision of a “fiery chariot” from the Old
Testament to produce an engineering analysis which concludes the Jewish
priest and prophet proba bly encountered an extraterrestrial spacecraft. On four
occasions over a 20-year period Ezekiel observed the same craft, according to
the Biblical account, which leads Blumrich to believe these trips represented
exploration missions to study humans and influence the development of human
civilization.
Spaceships of the Pleiades (Prometheus Books, 1995). Kal Korff traveled

to Switzerland to research this book exposing Swiss farmer Billy Meier, who
masterminded the most ambitious UFO hoax in history with his faked
photographs. Korff unmasks Meier’s criminal background and tracked down
former Meier friends and supporters who describe him as a charlatan who
began the hoax for financial gain.
Space-Time Transients (Nelson-Hall, 1977). Canadian psychologist Michael

Persinger and his research associate Gyslaine Lafreniere find correlations
between geomagnetic fields and the human perception of UFOs and alien
visitors. Their pioneering work found that many unexplained events occur
before intense solar and seismic activity. They theorize that the bioelectrical
systems of human brains, when exposed to high electric fields, can release
stored UFO and alien images from the unconscious and produce in the
percipient “dreamlike states, episodes of paralysis, or intervals of
unconsciousness.”
Sprinkle, R. Leo (b. 1930). Leo Sprinkle is a psychotherapist and researcher,

who is also a UFO experiencer. Dr. Sprinkle was a consultant to the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization and the Condon Committee at the
University of Colorado.
Dr. Sprinkle received his B.A. and M.P.S. degrees from the University of
Colorado, in 1952 and 1956, respectively; and his Ph.D. in Counseling
Psychology from the University of Missouri in 1961. He was Professor
Emeritus of Counseling Services at the University of Wyoming, when he
resigned to go into private practice in 1989. Dr, Sprinkle is nationally certified
and licensed and a Registrant of Counsel for the National Register of Health
Service Providers.
R. Leo Sprinkle
Dr. Sprinkle has participated in numerous television programs, including

ABC-TV’s “That’s Incredible,” NBC-TV’s “Tom Snyder, Tomorrow Show,”
and NBC’s “UFOs: Fact or Fantasy?” He has also appeared on many panels
with scientists such as J. Allen Hynek and Carl Sagan. He started the UFO
Investigation Conference for contactees and participated in the 1968
Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects (U. S. House Committee on
Science and Astronautics), the symposium “Scien and the UFO” sponsored by
the National Amateur Astronomers Association, and one sponsored by the
American Psychological Association.
Dr. Sprinkle’s book, entitled Soul Samples, was published in 1999.
105 South 4th Street

Address: Laramie, WY 82070
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: The status of UFO evidence is a deluge, not a

delusion. The characteristics of UF percipients show a wide range of age,
education, occupation, and cultural background; however, the evidence does not
support the hypothesis that UFO reports are submitted primarily by persons who
are experiencing neurotic or psychotic reactions.
The testimony of UFO witnesses indicates that they are convinced of the
reality of their UFO experiences; however, traditional scientific methods do not
provide “proof” of the existence of UFO phenomena. Thus, UFO investigators
face the question: Is UFO research a problem (to be solved) or a predicament
(to be tolerated)?
In my opinion, UFO investigation should continue at each level of existence:
“physical” reality, “biological” reality, “psychosocial” reality, and “spiritual”
reality There are problems for many investigators, from astronomers to
zoologists, from anthropologists to parapsychologists. The UFO problem
represents a significant challenge to science and humanity.
In my opinion, the present evidence for UFO phenomena indicates
(tentatively) that the Earth is the object of a survey by intelligent beings from
some other civilization(s). However, the evidence is not sufficient to determine
the origins, purposes, and powers of these intelligent beings.
The challenge of the UFO problem is to develop our scientific and spiritual
knowledge so that we can enter the “New Age” and communicate more
effectively with other beings who coexist in this complex universe.
—R. LEO SPRINKLE
Star People, The (Berkley, 1981). Husband and wife writing team Brad and
Francie Steiger not only believe that many humans are descendants of space
beings who mated with our species to prepare Earth for transformation, but
they themselves are Star People here to assist the aliens in that work. Among
the qualities which identify Star People: they have charisma, a rare blood type,
low body temperature, low blood pressure, feel an affinity for ancient Egypt,
and as a child had an invisible playmate.
Star People, The It was in his book Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the
Transformation of Man (1976) that Brad Steiger first set down a number of
apparent peculiarities associated with certain individuals who claimed contact
experiences with alleged alien entities. This research had developed from a
questionnaire created by Steiger in 1967 as a tool for fashioning a pattern
profile of paranormally talented individuals, contemporary mystics, and
spiritually oriented men and women. Because so many of these individuals had
begun to express an awareness that their “soul essences” had come to Earth
from other worlds or dimensions, Steiger decided to name these respondents
“The Star People” after an old Chippewa legend of people from the stars that
descended to mate with humans.
In 1968, Steiger had developed the questionnaire to define such Star People
characteristics as: extra or transitional vertebrae, lower than normal body
temperature, unusual blood type, acute sensitivity to electromagnetic fields,
chronic sinusitis, and great personal charisma. The research was further
delineated in The Star People (1981), with Frances Paschal Steiger, and The
Seed (1983).
By 1987, working together with his wife, Sherry Hansen Steiger, Brad
Steiger estimated that more than 30,000 men and women around the world had
responded to the questionnaire. They found the Star People in all ethnic groups,
all social strata, all occupations, and professions. Although they often express
the feeling of being “strangers in a strange land,” the Star People are essentially
“helpers”—many of them actively serving in such service-oriented professions
as nurses, doctors, clergy, social workers, teachers, counselors, and law
enforcement officers.
In 1992, Steiger and his wife Sherry published Starborn, revealing that over
90 percent of those who had returned the questionnaire claimed to have
experienced the mystical ecstasy of being “one with the universe.” A
remarkable 86 percent attest to some kind of contact with other-worldly or
other-dimensional beings.
In addition to the anomalous physical and psychic similarities that they
found among the questionnaire respondents, the Steigers found an intriguing
commonality of experiences that they term “activating incidents.” At around
the age of five nearly 85 percent of the respondents experienced a dramatic
interaction with an alleged angel, elf, holy figure, or UFO entity. At about the
age of eleven, nearly 80 percent suffered some sort of traumatic event—a
severe accident, a serious illness, the divorce of their parents, etc.—that caused
them to withdraw from the company of their peers and to retreat within for a
period of time.
Currently, the Steigers state that the greatest single commonality among the
Star People is a desire to be of service to the planet and all of Mother Earth’s
children. It is such a sense of mission that seems to distinguish those who
believe that they have interacted with some facet of a Higher Intelligence or
with an extraterrestrial or multidimensional being.
Research into the Star People phenomenon continues.
—ETEP STAFF
References
Steiger, Brad. Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the Transformation of Man. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1976; Berkley Books, 1981).
———. The Star People (Berkley Books, 1981).
———. Revelation: The Divine Fire (Berkley Books, 1981).
———. The Seed (Berkley Books, 1983).
Steiger, Brad and Sherry Hansen Steiger. Starborn (Berkley Books, 1992).
Steiger, Brad (b. 1936). Steiger taught American literature and creative writing
on secondary and college levels (1957-67). He is the author or coauthor of 148
books dealing with the paranonnal, including 22 on UFOs. He is also the co-
scriptwriter of Un-Known Powers, winner of the Film Advisory Board’s Award
of Excellence for 1978.
His major works on UFOs are: Mysteries of Time and Space (1974), and
Gods of Aquarius: UFOs and the Transformation of Man (1976); and, more
recently, co-authored with his wife Sherry: The Rainbow Conspiracy (1994),
and UFO Odyssey (1999).
P.O. Box 434

Address: Forest City, IA 50436
U.S.A.
Web site: www.bradandsherry.com
POSITION STATEMENT: I have come to the conclusion that some external

intelligence has interacted with humankind throughout history in an effort to
learn more about us—or in an effort to communicate certain basic truths and
concepts to our species.
I am also convinced there is a subtle kind of symbiotic relationship that
exists between humankind and the UFO intelligences. I think that in some way,
which we have yet to determine, they need us as much as we need them.
It is quite possible that either one or both of our species might once have had
an extraterrestrial origin, but the important thing is that the very biological and
spiritual evolution of Earth may depend upon the establishment of equilibrium
between us and our cosmic cousins.
I do not dogmatically rule out the extraterrestrial hypothesis, but I do lean
toward the theory that UFOs may be our neighbors right around the comer in
another space-time continuum. What we have thus far been labeling
“spaceships” may be, in reality, multidimensional mechanisms or psychic
constructs of our paraphysical companions.
I have even come to suspect that, in some instances, what we have been
terming “spaceships” may actually be a form of higher intelligence rather than
vehicles transporting occupants.
The UFO, the appearance of elves and “wee” people, and the manifestation
of archetypal images throughout the world sig nify that we are part of a larger
community of intelligences, a far more complex hierarchy of powers and
principalities, a potentially richer kingdom of interrelated species—both
physical and nonphysical—than we have been bold enough to believe.
I believe that numerous literal truths have been prompted by the UFO
intelligences. I believe that, through the ages, they have been provoking
humankind into higher spirals of intellectual and technological maturity,
guiding men and women toward ever-expanding mental and spiritual
awareness, pulling our species continually into the future.
Although these paraphysical, multidimensional entities have always
coexisted with us, in the last half-century they have been accelerating their
interaction with U.S. in preparation for a fast-approaching time of transition
and transformation. This period, we have been told, will be a difficult one; and
for generations our prophets and revelators have been referring to it as “the
great cleansing,” “Judgment Day,” “Armageddon.” But we have been promised
that, after a season of cataclysmic changes on the Earth plane, a New Age
consciousness will suffuse the planet. It is to this end that the UFO is a
transformative symbol.
—BRAD STEIGER
Brad and Sherry Steiger
Steiger, Sherry Hansen (b. 1945). While in seminary in the late 1960’s,
(Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago), Sherry noticed that many of the
things she considered to be mysteries of the Bible suddenly stood out to her in a
new way. She noticed that many descriptions in the Old Testament sounded
very “other worldly” in a UFO sense.
Her research at that time was interrupted by a passionate involvement with
the social issues of the surrounding community and of the church at large and
most of her years from that time forward, she served as counselor, teacher, in
various aspects of the ministry and later in advertising. Although throughout
the years her research and interest in UFOs and related fields, continued, it was
not until much later, that she came to work with Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
Sherry founded several non-profit schools in the late 1970s, for which she
was in the process of receiving major funding for educational efforts in the
media. One of the focus points was a media package she had written which was
her research involving UFOs. In her meeting with Dr. Hynek, to discuss how
her findings related to his own research, he asked her to work with him as his
personal manager and director of publicity. He was just in the process of
discussions with a benefactor who hoped to relocate Dr. Hynek to Scottsdale,
Arizona, where a second location for his Center for UFO Studies was proposed.
Sherry realized the immensity of Hynek’s vast involvement and research in the
field and didn’t think twice about putting her work on hold. She accepted the
honor and opportunity of Dr. Hynek’s urging for her to enter into an official
contractual relationship for a new partnership.
From late ’84 until the time of his death in 1986, Dr. Hynek had Sherry
interview people who were reporting their experiences and assist in an analysis
based on her experience as a counselor, as well as include her in most all
meetings and affairs of the Center in Phoenix. Sherry was working on
television, motion picture and international lecture and media exposure for Dr.
Hynek when a series of bizarre episodes regarding a “walk through” to see the
alien bodies and a release of major documents (into Dr. Hynek’s possession)
surfaced. A very high up official contacted Dr. Hynek and espoused details of
an elaborate unveiling of previously classified very top-secret government
documents and proof of alien craft and visitation to Earth that Hynek had so
meticulously researched and sought his entire career. Many mysterious and
somewhat “suspicious” events began to unfold until the sudden and untimely
death of Dr. Hynek in April of 1986. Sherry described some of the events in
The Rainbow Conspiracy (1994) one of 26 books she wrote/co-wrote with her
husband, Brad Steiger, since 1987.
P.O. Box 434
Address: Forest City, IA 50436
U.S.A.
E-mail: timewlkr@WCTAtel.net
Web site: www.bradandsherry.com
POSITION STATEMENT: My interest and research into the field of UFOs has
been from the religious perspective, initially stemming from the interaction and
guidance of Supernatural Beings in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. In
the Book of Exodus, we are told that a “pillar of fire” and “pillar of cloud” lead
the exodus out of Egypt. There is some awesome force contained in the Ark of
the Covenant and the Mercy Seat. We have the “chariots of fire” of the prophet
Elijah and the “wheels” of Ezekiel among many other ancient descriptions that
also match present day reports of UFO sightings and experiences.
In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul was “blinded by a light that spoke to
him on the road to Damascus and changed his life completely. Angels seemed
to travel on the “clouds of heaven” and often literally appear in a physical
manner, even to the point of partaking in food and lodging. Such angelic
physicality appears in the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorra, when
angels came to warn Lot and his family. The angels “looks” were so appealing
they were lusted after to the point where Lot had to secure the door to protect
them against the crowd, even offering one of his own daughters to the crowd if
they would leave the angels alone! Then, the angels blast and destroy the city
with what almost seems to be an atomic or nuclear blast.
I have come to see through my continued study from the 1960s on, that all
world religions have similar descriptions of astral vehicles and supernatural
beings and their interactions with humankind. I believe UFOs to be the
“Powers and Principalities”—as stated in the New Testament and may include
many other levels of existence—which could be likened to as Jesus said: “In
my Father’s House are many mansions” or dwelling places. I also believe that
as on Earth we have the positive and negative polarities there must be that of
the good and bad in the astral realms as well, meaning that some angels or
messengers may be demons—or fallen angels.
In my personal study with Native American Shaman, such as Rolling
Thunder and Grandfather David of the Hopi’s, I learned of the Native
American tradition of the Star Beings teaching and guiding them throughout
time. The similarities of all cultures and religions, ancient art and rock and cave
drawings of star craft and heavenly teachers are far too prevalent and universal
to be ignored or viewed as psychological or emotional disturbances...although,
certainly, those might be involved as well. Myths of elves, fairies and the like
share common threads of “encounters” and also must be taken into
consideration.
Certainly many sightings today are of “explained” phenomena, some which
are “top secret” airplanes and missions by various governments. But in my
counseling of individuals over time, considering the similarity of their own
experiences, sightings, and interactions, as well as my own, there is no doubt in
my mind that UFOs have been with us from the beginning and their interaction
is significant to me now, not only “theologically,” but in every other “ology”
and historicity there is!
—SHERRY HANSEN STEIGER
Stillings, Dennis (b. 1942). Dennis Stillings is the director of the Archaeus
Project, a group of professional people interested in the investigation of unusual
claims and anomalies for potential use in medicine and technology.
Stillings received his B.A. degree in philosophy from the University of
Minnesota in 1965. He also performed graduate work in mathematics and
German literature.
Stillings was the founding Director, now board member, of the Five
Mountain Medical Community organization, which seeks to promote
Northwest Hawaii as a health and healing destination for the Pacific Rim. He is
editor of the publication Healing Island, and former editor of the now-defunct
journals Artifex and Archaeus. He has published over 60 papers on
anomalistics, popular culture, and the history of medicine. Stillings is a member
of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, the Society for Scientific Exploration, a
Fellow of the American Institute of Stress.
P.O. Box 7079

Address: Kamuela, HI 96743
U.S.A.
E-mail: dstillings@kohalacenter.org
Dennis Stillings
POSITION STATEMENT: My position on UFOs is not far different from what

is expressed by the title of Jung’s monograph on the subject: Flying Saucers: A
Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. While I believe that there is a
residuum of UFO cases that represent genuine anomalies—aspects of reality that
would seem to deserve serious scientific investigation—I am exceedingly
pessimistic as to whether we have the tools, mental or physical, to do so.
On the other hand, a large part of the “UFO phenomenon” is psychosocial,
and is therefore susceptible to investigation by means that are to hand. It is a
fact that these things are reported, and there is a great collection of
psychological facts to be found in the reports of sightings and contacts and the
theories about them. These can be studied and, at least for the foreseeable
future, form the only basis for anything that can be called a “science of
UFOlogy.”
—DENNIS STILLINGS
Story, Ronald D. (b. 1946). Author, technical writer/editor, and founder of the
original UFO Encyclopedia Project. In association with the Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization (APRO), between 1976 and 1979, Story compiled and
edited the first UFO encyclopedia entitled The Encyclopedia of UFOs
(published by Doubleday and New English Library in 1980).
Story studied anthropology, astronomy, and logic in preparing for his degree
in philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he graduated (with honors) in
1970.
Story’s interest in UFOs dates from his student days at the University of
Arizona, where he met professor James McDonald, during the late 1960s.
Together, Story and McDonald investigated a “ghost light” that Story had
photographed in his home state of Missouri.
As a technical writer/editor, since 1983, Story has worked primarily in the
high-tech defense industry for aerospace companies such as Hughes Aircraft,
Rockwell, McDonnell-Douglas, Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin.
As a science writer, Story first wrote The Space-Gods Revealed (1976), a
scientific critique of Erich von Däniken’s ancient astronaut theory as presented
in Chariots of the Gods? (1968) and other books. Story was assisted on the
project by leading astronomers and archaeologists, such as Carl Sagan (who
wrote the foreword), Frank Drake, William Hartmann, Thor Heyerdahl, Edwin
Ferdon, William Rathje, Merle Green Robertson, et al.
Story’s other books include Guardians of the Universe? (1980) and UFOs
and the Limits of Science (1981).
3540 32nd Ave. N. #114

Address: St. Petersburg, FL 33713
U.S.A.
E-mail: RonaldDStory@aol.com
Web site: www.RonaldStory.com

Ronald Story
POSITION STATEMENT: I think UFOs represent a wide variety of different

phenomena: some natural, some man-made, and some, perhaps, of
extraterrestrial origin. It may very well be that some UFOs carry alien beings on
a mission to Earth. Although absolute proof is lacking, there are enough
anomalous events to establish probable cause; therefore, I think the prudent
course is to prepare ourselves for anything that may happen
Though I favor the psycho-social approach, I think it is possible that an
extraterrestrial intelligence may have had a hand in humanity’s origins and that
we could be in for a second coming. In any case, I believe the impact of such
open contact and intervention with people of Earth would constitute the single
most significant event in human history.
According to the Bible, we were created by an extraterrestrial intelligence
(which in Hebrew is pluralized as Elohim or “gods”) with our fate depending
on our relationship with that superior force. In this respect, modern-day contact
with such a superior intelligence would affect every aspect of our lives,
including, perhaps, our own survival.
Therefore, I believe in making every effort—using the scientific method—to
continue our search for the truth, wherever it may lead.
—RONALD D. STORY
Story’s UFO “observations”:

1) “UFOs,” in one form or another, have existed since ancient times.
2) Whatever else “they” or “it” may be, the “UFO” is a perennial symbol. It
connotes the magical, the technological, and the unknown. “UFOs” are the
modern equivalents of comets and other unknown lights and shapes seen by
the ancients that have always meant impending change.
3) “UFOs” have always been associated with a superior, extraterrestrial—or
ultraterrestrial—intelligence.
4) UFO-aliens seem to be modern replacements for angels and demons, as well
as fairies and other magical creatures of earlier times. In fact, many today
still believe in angels and demons as well as aliens. Belief in fairies has
declined slightly.
5) The UFO phenomenon did not just happen one day—it evolved.
Spiritualism became contacteeism. The age-old spirits became the aliens of
today. Their history can be traced, and their messages are essentially the
same.
6) The UFO/ET myth fulfils psychological needs, which are ageless and
timeless. If aliens did not exist, we would invent them.
7) The human mind seeks order, meaning, and explanation. Superior alien life-
forms (advanced intelligence) fulfills those needs.
8) Humans are fallible. So-called “eyewitness testimony” and alleged
“contact” experiences do not constitute proof of anything. They “happen,”
in one sense or another, but their interpretation is open to question and
debate.
9) Fantasy is not just simple nonsense; it is a natural and pervasive component
of everyday life. It provides us humans with a coping mechanism to deal
with the dullness and disappointments of reality. Without all sorts of fantasy
thinking—taking place mostly at the unconscious level—the real world
would be impossible for most of us to endure.
10) For most of us post-moderns, science fiction has become our myth, and
science has become our religion. Due mainly to media influences and a
hideously complicated world, most people are finding it increasingly
difficult to distinguish fantasy from reality. And many do not want to.
11) As in earlier times, most people are heavily influenced by authority figures,
and today those authority figures are scientists, government and business
leaders, and to a lesser extent—the clergy. Unlike earlier times, today we
look to science for answers to most of our questions about life in the
universe. The world has become more materialistic than spiritualistic, and
so our spiritual needs go largely unmet.
12) Advanced extraterrestrials are accepted by many today as the gods of the
age of science. Others see them as gods of both the material and spiritual
realms.
13) UFOs and ETs may be visiting Earth, but this writer sees a different pattern
in the data.
14) Alleged “contact” experiences are almost always surrealistic in nature.
Freud called this the “dreamwork.” UFO-contact experiences have all the
tell-tale signs of the dreamwork as do myths and dreams. Surrealism is the
fingerprint of fantasy and virtually all alien contacts bear the fingerprint.
15) In this writer’s view, the key to the UFO phenomenon is to rise above the
literal and materialistic viewpoints, and begin to understand the “UFO
message,” which matches the wisdom of the ages as taught by the greatest
philosophers and religious teachers of Earth. In UFOlogy, these teachings
are called “Cosmic Laws,” and they have universal application.
16) If these teachings are not implemented soon, it may be too late for
humankind and we could become an extinct species. What survives will not
be human, but rather an alien nation (as in the word “alienation.”). The
”Borg” of Star Trek is a fantasy (or metaphorical fiction) that will become
even more real than it already is. Humans will become increasingly more
like robots, and dehumanization on Earth will be complete.
—RONALD D. STORY
Stranger at the Pentagon, The (I.E.C., 1967). Evangelist Frank Stranges

claims he befriended a Venusian named Valiant Thor here on a mission to
neutralize Earth’s nuclear weapons. Stranges says he met Thor at the Pentagon
in Washington, D.C. where he had taken up residence for three years as the
guest of President Dwight Eisenhower.
Stranges. Frank E. (b. 1927). Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Frank
Stranges was close to death at birth, and weak and sickly in his youth. As a
young man he was kidnapped, robbed, and shot at, but, he says, “By the Grace
of God, I dodged all that fate was able to hurl at me and scurried on to an active
life.” He has been active, indeed, as an evangelist who combines his teaching of
the scriptures with books, lectures, and movies on UFOs.
In part, his special mission was spurred on by a supposed meeting with a
man from Venus, by the name of Val Thor, whose purpose on Earth was “to
help mankind return to the Lord.” This meeting allegedly occurred, of all
places, within the confines of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Frank Stranges
Dr. Stranges gives his academic credentials as follows: “a Ph.D. in

psychology, a Th.D., D.D., B.Th, B.C. Ed., Ll.D., Doctor of Humanities, and
Grand Evangelist of the Sovereign Order of Alfred the Great.” He says he
attended “colleges in the United States, doing further study at the Graduate
Theological Seminary, Macau, Asia; Hong Kong; and at the Society of St. Luke
the Physician, London, England”; also, “a Ph.D. from the National Institute of
Criminology, Washington.” Another source has his doctor of psychology and
philosophy degrees coming from Faith Bible College and Theological
Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Stranges is the president of International Evangelism Crusades, Inc. (IEC),
as well as the National Investigations Committee on Unidentified Flying
Objects (NICUFO). His early books included: Flying Saucerama (1959); My
Friend from Beyond Earth (1960); and The Stranger at the Pentagon (1967).
He has since expanded this list considerably to include many other books, as
well as numerous audio and video tapes.
14617 Victory Blvd.
Address: Suite #4
Van Nuys, CA 91411 U.S.A.
E-mail: drfes@earthlink.net
POSITION STATEMENT: UFOlogy, in and of itself, presents a number of

avenues of investigation and research. However, there is one avenue that has
been sadly neglected: that being the spiritual ramifications.
When one deals with the deeper, more important aspects of UFOlogy—other
than the “nuts and bolts” of the mystery—one tears aside the veil and cannot
help but notice a spiritual side. A new door is opened, which reveals that those
from other worlds are deeply interested in our spiritual well being
My personal experience with one at the Pentagon in 1959 causes me to
believe that many of those from space are here to assist the human family in a
most wonderful and exci1ing manner.
Consider that a being, traveling millions of miles from deep space, would
not travel to this planet unless there was more than a reason, simply to land on
the White House lawn and loudly announce their presence. The evidence
reveals a deeper, more effective and valuable reason for their visits.
Knowing this, I have been privileged to share this information with other
people, which has: (1) elevated their spiritual consciousness; (2) given them
ways and means to improve their living status and prosper in their respective
communities; and (3) revealed ways and means toward better health.
The spiritual information shared by those from other worlds is far more
important that information as to how to build a spacecraft. This is my opinion
regarding the spiritual value of space contact. As a clergyman for some 50
years, I am well acquainted with the ancient records that are recorded in the
Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew bibles. There is far too much evidence within the
confines of the Bible that totally supports the truth that UFOs are real and that
they are here for a divine purpose.
—FRANK STRANGES
Strauch photo At 6:10 P.M., on the evening of October 21, 1965, Mr. Arthur
Strauch, Deputy Sheriff of Sibley County, Minnesota, in the company of four
others, was returning from a bow-hunting trip by car when he spotted a strange
object which seemed to be two thousand feet above the ground and a quarter-
mile distant to the northwest. They were two miles west and two miles north of
Saint George. The group stopped the car and watched. Strauch got out and
observed the object through 7x35 binoculars, while the others watched from
inside the car.
After watching for about ten minutes, the group drove down the road about a
half-mile and stopped. Strauch got out of the car and snapped a photo just as
the object began to move. It moved into the wind (northeast) for what appeared
to be several hundred feet and then stopped for a few seconds, at which time its
lights changed from a bright white to a dull orange, alternating several times. It
then moved toward the southeast at a high rate of speed and disappeared out of
sight. As it passed over their heads, the witnesses heard a high-pitched whining
sound.
Photograph by Arthur Strauch
The witnesses were: Arthur A. Strauch (47), Deputy Sheriff of Sibley

County, Minnesota; his wife, Mrs. Katherine Strauch (44), housewife; Gary
Martin Strauch (16), high school student and son of Mrs. and Mrs. Strauch;
Donald Martin Grewe (26), a technician, and his wife, Mrs. Retha Ann Grewe
(25), a registered nurse.
Strauch used a Kodak Instamatic camera with Ektachrome color-slide film.
He had the focus set at infinity, and the shutter speed was set at 1/60th of a
second.
The sun had just set and the sky was clear. The moon had not risen, and
Venus was clearly visible in the southeast. One small star was visible to the
right and below the UFO.
Testimony of the witnesses differs only in minor details. Whereas Arthur
Strauch said the object appeared as large as a quarter held at arm’s length, his
wife just said it was much larger than the evening star; Gary Strauch said it was
like a quarter held at arm’s length, and so did Donald Grewe. Mrs. Grewe said
it was the size of “a large star.”
Eyewitness drawing by Arthur Strauch
Mrs. Grewe, Mrs. Strauch, and Gary remained inside the car, while Mr.
Grewe and Mr. Strauch got out to observe the object. At first they heard no
sound. But then as the object flew over them, Grewe described the sound as a
“whistling whine.” Strauch called it a “high-pitched whining sound, as made by
an electrical motor starting up.”
Mr. Strauch’s description was the most detailed as he viewed the object with
the aid of binoculars. He said: “I have no idea what it was. All I can report is
that it was different from anything I had ever seen in the sky. I’m positive it
was a machine driven by some inner power that has tremendous speed. The
outline was unmistakable through my binoculars as that of a flying saucer.”
Strauch stated: “The rounded top of the dome was a metallic-silver gray that
reflected the rays of the setting sun, turning the object into a large orange ball.
Surrounding the dome were four small portholes that emitted a bright yellow
light. Just below the windows or ports was an area that glowed a light blue.
This light seemed to be a reflection of some inner light or perhaps exhaust.
From the edge of the blue light’s reflection to the edge of the flat saucer-like
surface (outer edge), the outer ring was rotating counterclockwise, causing it to
throw off an aurora or halo of light that changed from orange to white with an
overall tinge of blue and green. The extreme outer edge of the saucer glowed a
bright orange, and this part did not move or rotate.”
Strauch said, “I do not believe that the light went out in the machine as... we
lost sight of it, but rather that it had such tremendous speed that it just
disappeared into space.”
Strieber, Whitley (b. 1945). Whitley Strieber is probably the world’s most
famous “abductee” and certainly the most articulate. His book Communion—a
#1 bestseller in 1987—has sold over ten million copies worldwide, and was also
made into a full-length motion picture. In this and other books, Strieber speaks
freely about childhood abductions, rectal probes, alien implants, mind control,
and government involvement. Communion was the first book of its kind: a first-
person account of the surrealistic “Visitor” phenomenon, as Strieber calls it,
composed by a literary master with obvious intelligence and insight
Strieber was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and spent many years
living in New York. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Texas,
and studied at the London Film School.
A master storyteller, Strieber is the author of eighteen books, including the
novels The Wolfen (1978) and The Hunger (1981), both of which were made
into feature films. Andrew Sarris has ranked The Hunger among the top ten
horror films of all time.
Strieber’s other successful books include: Warday (1984), Nature’s End
(1986), Transformation (1988), and Majestic (1989). Strieber’s books have sold
over twenty-two million copies worldwide
Strieber’s nonfiction title Confirmation (1998) was made into a two-hour
special by NBC. It aired on February 17, 1999, and reached over thirteen
million viewers.
Since 1987, Strieber has made hundreds of television appearances and has
become well known as a leading authority on mysteries of science.
His latest book, The Coming Global Superstorm (1999), was written in
partnership with radio talk-show host Art Bell. Strieber, himself, is now the
host of the popular “Dreamland” segment of the Art Bell Show.
5928 Broadway
Address: San Antonio, TX 78209
U.S.A.
E-mail: whitley@strieber.com
Web site: www.whitleysworld.com
Whitley Strieber
POSITION STATEMENT: The [UFO] evidence, if it is properly addressed by

science, has the power to change completely the way we deal with this issue,
possibly providing us with wonderful new discoveries and in formation. But
there are problems. Not everybody is open-minded. Not everybody is ready to
entertain such evidence as may be presented....But as a society, it would seem
that we can now take the whole question another step forward and maybe at last
start to move toward some satisfactory answers. Taking an interest need not
imply a commitment to belief in alien contact, but we must seriously ask who or
what is causing the UFO and close encounter phenomena, why it is taking place,
and, above all, what its significance may be.
It is also necessary to face the fact that the existence of the evidence means
that there really may be aliens here—aliens who are creating an extraordinary
theater in the sky while at the same time entering the personal lives of many
people in extremely bizarre and secretive ways.
Unless we deal in an organized and effective manner with the hard evidence
that has come to light, we are going to remain passive to what could be not only
a valuable knowledge resource but also an intrusion into our world that may or
may not be in our best interest. Given its intimacy and the incredibly
provocative nature of many contact reports, that doesn’t seem wise.
—WHITLEY STRIEBER
(Position statement was adapted from Strieber’s book Confirmation, 1998).

Swiatek, Robert P. (b. 1953). Robert Swiatek has been researching UFOs
since 1968, becoming associated with the Fund for UFO Research in 1986. He
currently serves as secretary-treasurer of that organization, and is also a director
of the UFO Research Coalition
Swiatek’s active participation with the Fund has necessitated his
involvement with, inter alia, the Roswell incident, abductions, and UFO
history.
A Pennsylvania native, Swiatek received his B.A. degree from Bloomsburg
State College in 1975—double-majoring in physics and Earth science—
followed by one year of graduate study in physics at Lehigh University. In the
summer of 1974, he worked at NASA Headquarters for the manager of the
Seasat program.
Since 1976 he has been employed as a physics patent examiner at the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office in Arlington, Virginia. Swiatek has evaluated
applications in various “arts” at the Patent Office, including aeronautics and
space technology.
10621 John Ayres Dr.

Address: Fairfax, VA 22032
U.S.A.
E-mail: swiman@pop.dn.net
POSITION STATEMENT: Fifty-plus years of UFO activity have proffered no

definitive proof that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft, and researchers
continue to maintain their traditional posture of collecting sighting reports,
separating genuine unknowns from IFOs, and trying to convince a skeptical
world that a legitimate phenomenon of unknown origin holds sway
Robert Swiatek
However, when objectively considered, the very best cases do indicate the
presence of an unknown phenomenon that is not of human, atmospheric, or
astronomical origin. Whether the unknowns are solid craft, weird intrusions of
some kind from a postulated alternate universe, or holograms is mere
conjecture, but in my opinion a nonhuman intelligence is behind them.
Continued collection of sighting reports in the absence of both an
instrumented effort to obtain empirical data and the construction of theories to
explain sighting and landing trace details is useless inasmuch as thousands of
excellent reports have been logged and investigated to date. Even so, if
witnesses to the so-called Roswell debris and other crashed UFOs are correct,
the U.S. Government has in its possession material to resolve the debate.
Episodes of mass psychogenic illness and a consideration of UFO abductees—
who rarely panic despite being allegedly taken by aliens onboard their craft—
give no support to the view there will be a societal meltdown in the event UFOs
are revealed to be alien vehicles.
—ROBERT SWIATEK
T
Takeda (Japan) photo This UFO was allegedly observed and photographed
by Shinichi Takeda (of Fujisaw City) near Enoshima Miani Beach, Japan. The
time was approximately 11:30 A.M. The date was August 20, 1957.
Mr. Takeda’s sister first called his attention to it. The object was reported as
silvery in color, glowing brilliantly, and seemed to be at around three or four
thousand feet altitude, traveling in a southerly direction. When directly
overhead, the object made a 90-degree turn and increased its speed from what
seemed to be about 250 to 500 kmph—then disappeared into the clouds.
A few minutes later, about fifteen bathers at Enoshima Miani Beach
reportedly spotted a similar object, which passed over the beach at high speed,
without making a sound.
Tehran (Iran) jet chase This UFO encounter took place in the vicinity of
Shahrokhi Air Force Base, Tehran, Iran, during the early morning hours of
September 19, 1976. The incident involved multiple witnesses on the ground
(both Iranian civilians and high-ranking military), pilots and crews of two F-4
Phantom jet fighters, radar confirmation, and apparent electromagnetic effects.
Initial reports came in shortly after midnight (local time), to the air base by
telephone from citizens living in the Shemiran district of Tehran, who spotted
an unusual bright light in the night sky. No shape was discerned, just a brilliant
light source, like “a helicopter with a shining light.” A quick check by the
command post duty officer showed no helicopters or planes to be in the area, so
he called the deputy commander of operations for instructions. The deputy
commander relayed a message to the effect that the citizens were merely
observing stars, but the commander himself was not so sure. He proceeded to
look for himself and, after observing a brilliant light (subsequently determined
to be seventy miles distant at this point), decided to scramble an Iranian Air
Force F-4 Phantom jet to investigate.
At 1:30 A.M., the jet was roaring down the Shahrokhi runway in pursuit of a
UFO. As the F-4 crew were headed north of Tehran toward the unidentified
light source, control tower operators watched from the base. The first forty-five
miles of the flight proceeded uneventfully, but as the jet approached within
twenty-five nautical miles of the object, all instrumentation and
communications, both UHF and intercom, on the plane suddenly went dead.
Rendered defenseless, the pilot broke off the intercept and headed back to base.
As the plane retreated, all electronic systems were restored.
As the first plane landed at 1:40 A.M., a second F-4 pilot took off to try his
luck. Airborne radar contact was made at a distance of twenty-seven nautical
miles from the object, the return being described as similar to the size of the
return of a Boeing 707 tanker aircraft. As the second jet closed within twenty-
five miles of the UFO, it pulled ahead, keeping the pursuer at that constant
distance. The visual description of the object was “flashing strobe lights
arranged in a rectangular pattern and alternating blue, green, red, and orange in
color. The sequence of the lights was so fast that all the colors could be seen at
once.”
As the jet continued to pace the object, now on a course to the south of
Tehran, the UFO suddenly ejected a smaller object, which came streaking
toward the Phantom at a high rate of speed. As the (apparent) “projectile” came
closer, the weapons-control panel and all communications on the jet were lost,
just as had happened with the first F-4. The pilot, therefore, executed an
evasive dive, but the projectile continued to trail him at an estimated distance of
three to four miles. After an accelerated circular turn, the smaller UFO then
proceeded to rejoin the primary object and merged back with it. Meanwhile, the
jet’s weapons-control system and communications equipment became operative
again, and the F-4 crew bravely continued their pursuit.
Shortly, another smaller object again separated from the main UFO, but this
time it headed for the ground below. Anticipating a great explosion, the crew of
the jet watched as the jettisoned mini-object gently came to rest on a dry lake
bed below, casting a bright light over an area of two to three kilometers all
around. The light soon faded, and the main UFO disappeared also, speeding off
into the night.
A daylight inspection was made of the apparent “landing site,” but no traces
were found. There was some corroboration, however, in the form of testimony
from a local resident in the area who had heard a loud sound and seen a very
bright light.
An official document released under the Freedom of Information and
Privacy Act on August 31, 1977, by the United States Department of Defense,
recounts the events which took place during the Iranian jet-chase episode but
adds little to what was already reported. It did reiterate, however, the puzzling
nature of this case; the fact that what was observed by multiple witnesses has
yet to be satisfactorily explained.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
UFO Investigator (published by NICAP, November 1976).
UFO Investigator (published by NICAP, September 1977).
Temple of the Stars (Neville Spearman, 1962). Brinsley LePoer Trench use
his second book on the ancient astronaut theme to make a case that Atlantis,
Stonehenge, the Pyramids, and other megalithic monuments scattered over the
planet were gifts from extraterrestrial visitors. Trench, a member of the British
House of Lords believes the British Isles are sacred territory, because the
megaliths there are a legacy of our Atlantean forebears who in turn owed their
civilization to those space visitors known as the Sky People.
theories, UFO Numerous hypotheses have been advanced to explain UFO

reports. They can be divided two major categories, the first advocating convent
explanations (involving no purposeful intelligence) the second advocating
unconventional explanations involving purposeful intelligence).
The conventional category includes such mundane explanations as aircraft,
balloons, birds, and planets may also encompass more imaginative possibilities,
as ball lightning, swamp gas, insect swarms, as well as various psychological
explanations. Hoaxes and hallucinations also fall under the conventional
category.
The unconventional category is composed of eight major “theories,”
although there is little to warrant the designation of “theory,”; a more
appropriate label might be “speculation” or, in some cases, “hypothesis.” These
eight “theories” are: (1) the secret weapon theory; (2) the hollow Earth theory;
(3) the underwater civilization theory; (4) The space animal theory; (5) the
extraterrestrial hypothesis; (6) the time travel theory; (7) the ultraterrestrial
theory; and (8) the psychic projection theory. The likelihood of each theory is
assessed below.
The Secret Weapon Theory: This theory, especially popular in the 1950s and
again in recent times, refers to advanced technological flying devices
constructed by the U. S. Government or some foreign power. The proposition
has some very serious problems. First, UFOs were reported soon after World
War II, when military jet aircraft were barely operational. Had the U. S. had
operational “saucers” capable of the performance described, it would not have
expended the hundreds of billions of dollars that it has, since that time, in the
development of alternate and less efficient military weapons systems.
Secondly, even if such craft had been experimentally tested, or even
operationally deployed, they would not have been permitted to approach
civilian airports, urban centers, and all the everyday places where UFOs are
reported. Also, they would not have been deployed to the dozens of countries
from where UFO reports have come. On the other hand, such craft would very
probably have been revealed to the world as a major technological
breakthrough and as a warning to all potential adversaries. The political
advantages of the latter would have been enormous.
A third problem would be the question of security. The development and
operation of such craft would have involved many thousands of persons over a
long period of time, and it is almost inconceivable that the secret would not
have eventually surfaced. These same arguments can, of course, be applied to a
Soviet secret weapon, or one from any other country. A British/Canadian secret
weapon theory, for example, was once in vogue, and one organization has been
promoting a Nazi secret weapon theory, interwoven with Adolf Hitler’s
possible survival and escape from Berlin. The organization has published a
book supporting this claim and also makes available other Nazioriented books,
posters, bumper stickers, and tapes (such as “Beautiful Nazi Songs and
Marches,” “Songs of the Brownshirts,” Dr. Goebbels and the Third Reich,” and
“Adolph Hitler Speaks to the Reichstag”). (Mattern and Friedrich, 1976) As
with all other “secret weapon” theories, it is difficult to imagine how such craft
could have been operated for over thirty years without political utilization or
without the truth emerging.
The Hollow Earth Theory: Perhaps the most ingenious of all, the original
hollow Earth theory was advanced by several writers early in the century, but
was later linked to UFOs and popularized by Ray Palmer and Dr. Raymond
Bernard (who some think was one and the same person). In the early 1960s,
Bernard claimed that the Earth was actually a hollow sphere, with two openings
at the poles, and that “flying saucers” belonged to a secret civilization living
inside the Earth. (Bernard, 1964)
The theory supposedly gained support from observations made during
Admiral Richard E. Byrd’s Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. However, Dr.
Laurence M. Gould, second in command during Byrd’s first Antarctic
expedition, denied any such observations or discoveries. Dr. Gould, a
distinguished University of Arizona geologist, discussed the matter with
Admiral Byrd several times prior to the latter’s death in 1957, and both were
amazed at the observations attributed to them. When he was president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1953, Dr. Gould
considered but finally declined an invitation to address the Hollow Earth
Society, then meeting in Tucson, and believed that, had he accepted the
invitation, it would have been promoted endlessly as an endorsement of the
hollow Earth theory.
The hollow Earth theory was examined in 1970 by Dr. John S. Derr, a
professional seismologist, then working on the Viking Mars lander project with
Martin Marrietta Corporation, and later with the U. S. Geological Survey. Dr.
Derr discussed several types of geodetic and seismological data which clearly
demonstrated that the Earth is not, and cannot be, hollow. Artificial satellite
perturbations, for example, show not only that the Earth is solid, but that its
mass is concentrated toward its center, contrary to that “predicted” by the
hollow Earth theory. He also presented seismological data concerning the free
oscillations of the Earth and the velocity of compressional and shear waves in
the Earth following earthquakes. (Derr, 1970)
Dr. Derr’s analysis, plus other less sophisticated but more obvious evidence
(such as the fact that numerous U.S. and Soviet satellites, which continually fly
over the poles, have not, apparently, photographed the openings) leaves little
doubt that UFOs, whatever they are, do not originate from a civilization in a
hollow Earth.
The Underwater Civilization Theory: Reports of unknown objects entering
or leaving large bodies of water (or proceeding through them) have been made
from time to time and have been labeled unidentified submarine objects
(USOs). Numerous theorists have consequently speculated that secret UFO
bases might be located on the ocean beds, far from human activities and
possible detection. By moving underwater, UFOs would have access to all
continents and, by proceeding up major rivers and tributaries, could reach many
inland locations without risking detection by atmospheric flight.
Vehicles capable of interstellar flight, some proponents of the extraterrestrial
hypothesis point out, would certainly be able to withstand the pressures and
stresses of deep oceanic environments. This point has some validity, and it can
also be stated that some of the most remote areas of the planet are located in
parts of the southern Pacific and Indian oceans, providing easy access from the
atmosphere with minimum_chance of visual or electronic detection.
At the same time, it could be asked why the UFO operators go to such
lengths to remain unobserved, only to display their vehicles so blatantly in such
populated areas as the United States and Europe.
One of the proponents of the underwater theory was the late naturalist Ivan
T. Sanderson, who not only proposed that an extraterrestrial civilization could
be using the ocean depths, but that a native civilization, one having evolved
underwater long before man, could also be doing so. He concluded, in fact, that
“it is likely that both suggestions apply.” Although he provided no sources or
references, Sanderson stated that over 50 percent of all UFO reports concerned
objects over, coming from, or going towards (or into) bodies of water.
(Sanderson, 1970)
The underwater civilization theory, like the hollow Earth theory, addresses
the question of the possible location of UFO operational centers. As such, it is
not altogether unreasonable, but it provides no real answer to the question of
UFO origin.
The Space Animal Theory: One of the least popular of all “unconventional”
theories, the space animal theory was first brought to public attention, curiously
enough, by the U. S. Air Force during its Project Sign activity in the late 1940s.
The Project “Saucer” (Sign was then still a classified code name) press release
of April 27, 1949, admitted that the idea had been “remotely considered,” and
that many UFOs “acted more like animals than anything else.” The Air Force
concluded that few such reports were reliable. The concept was also contained
in the final Project Sign Technical Report of February 1949 (declassified in
1961).
Trevor James Constable (writing under the pen name of Trevor James)
advocated a space animal explanation for UFOs in 1958, and none other than
Kenneth Arnold), the man whose sighting opened the UFO era (and who was
responsible for coining the label “flying saucer”), concluded that UFOs “... are
groups and masses of living organisms that are as much a part of our
atmosphere and space as the life we find in the oceans.” (Arnold, 1962)
Naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson again addressed the question, and many others,
in 1967, concluding that there was “... nothing illogical, irrational, or even
improbable about it. In fact, it is so probable that it must be given first rank in
consideration of the question, ‘What could UAO’s [unexplained aerial objects]
be?’” (Sanderson, 1967) That same year, Vincent H. Gaddis addressed the
topic, attributing the original idea to a John P. Bessor, who had sent it to the Air
Force the month following Arnold’s classic 1947 sighting. Gaddis discussed the
writings on the subject by Austrian Countess Zoe Wassilko-Serecki, and John
Cage, a New Jersey inventor, and concluded that “...the time will come when
one or more of these entities will be caught, weighed, measured, and
exhibited.” (Gaddis, 1967)
Trevor James Constable again wrote about space animals in the 1970s, this
time in more detail. (Constable, 1976; 1978) He postulated that the UFO space
animals “...are amoebalike life-forms existing in the plasma state. They are not
solid, liquid, or gas. Rather, they exist in the fourth state matter—plasma—as
living heat-substance at the upper border of physical nature.” He also believed
that they are of low intelligence and, because they remain in the infrared part of
the electromagnetic spectrum, usually invisible. He concluded that they had
“...deeply confused UFO research.” Although life may be found in some of the
harshest of conditions and in some of the most unlikely places on the planet, it
is doubtful that complex life-forms could evolve in space or even in the upper
regions of the atmosphere, where exposure to cosmic rays and other radiations,
such as those originating from solar flares, would be maximized. The absence
of oxygen for carbon-based life would also rule out biological space animals,
and the possibility of life existing in a plasma state is, at best, speculative.
The space animal theory has never captured the public imagination, and it
has not been seriously considered by most UFO researchers.
The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH): By far the most popular “theory”
concerning the origin of UFOs, the ETH is also the one that, over the years, has
aroused the most emotion and controversy. It is based on the assumption that
one or more civilizations from outer space, far in advance of our own, have
mastered interstellar space flight and have had the human race under systematic
observation since at least 1947. Some see a long-term involvement by the
extraterrestrials and propose that they have been watching over us, and perhaps
even controlling our physical and cultural development for millennia, thus
linking the ETH to the ancient astronaut concept.
The main problems with the ETH are space and time: space in the sense that
the average distance between the 130 billion or more stars in our Milky Way
galaxy is enormous, and time in the sense that these great distances would
make interstellar voyages very long, not to mention the economic, engineering,
and motivational aspects such an enterprise.
Despite this, there is a pro-UFO movement that uncritically believes in the
ETH. There is no problem with such a belief, provided it is identified as such
and is not construed as representing an empirical fact. At the same time, the
idea of an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs, as a hypothesis, is quite reasonable,
despite the strong feelings against the possibility by many scientists who should
know better. To deny the validity of a reasonable hypothesis because of an
emotional commitment to other explanatory possibilities is not consistent with
operational procedures in science, regardless of how learned such individuals
may be or how persuasive their arguments may appear.
The real basis for the ETH debate, although many involved in the debate are
seemingly unaware of it, is not over whether (or how much) advanced
intelligence exists in the galaxy. Most scientists will agree that there are
probably many such intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. It is not even over
whether such civilizations have developed interstellar-travel capability. The real
point of debate concerns the “volume of traffic.” That is, most scientists find it
very difficult to accept the idea of extraterrestrial visitation on the scale implied
by UFO reports; that, to them, tends to invalidate all UFO reports. In fact, if
UFO sightings were not so common (say, just one good report every three or
four years), perhaps more scientists would seriously consider the ETH.
Interestingly, this is precisely the reverse of what many exasperated UFO
proponents realize, in their attempts to “prove” the ETH by the sheer number of
reports.
Despite intensive research by many individuals, scientific bodies, and
federal agencies for over three decades, no proof of extraterrestrial visitation
has been produced. Such an idea, therefore, must remain as only a viable and
intriguing hypothesis, very difficult to test, and frustrating to debate.
The Time Travel Theory: Like most UFO “theories,” the time travel theory
lacks any empirical supporting evidence; contrary to what one might expect,
however, it is probably the least-popular theory in circulation.
The theory is based on the premise that we will eventually progress to such a
high technological level that, in learning how to control certain forces of nature,
it will be within our power to manipulate the barriers of time and space and
“return” to our present time, or any other we wish. It has to be admitted that
there are certain astrophysical phenomena currently being studied (i.e., quasars,
black holes), which are not properly understood, and there is every indication
that some fundamental natural processes in the universe have yet to be
identified, described, and incorporated into our framework of knowledge.
Nevertheless, the only hints of a time travel basis for UFOs are in the
behavioral and morphological descriptions of occupants sometimes reported to
pilot them. The behavioral component refers to reports that such occupants
generally avoid contact, or at least do not go beyond an informal
communication with wit nesses. This “policy of noninterference” would seem
to be more appropriate for a society visiting its own past, which has already
“happened,” than for an interstellar-traveling society, which might be anxious
to establish formal links with new civilizations.
The morphological component involves the biological feature of neoteny, a
characteristic in which infantile features are retained in the adult form. A
neotenous trend is evident in the primates, particularly in man (the result is a
longer childhood and the acquisition of knowledge and values by children), and
the trend will theoretically continue in the future. This implies that human
adults, at some future time, could look more like today’s children. Curiously,
UFO occupants are described as small and childlike, with large heads relative
to their bodies. Both of these speculative forms of evidence must rely, of
course, on the authenticity and reliability of UFO reports involving
“occupants.”
The possibility of UFO occupants being extraterrestrial time travelers (i.e.,
not from our future) is not generally addressed by UFO researchers.
The Ultraterrestrial Theory: In the late 1960s, a number of UFO authorities
became disenchanted with the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which they now
considered antiquated. Impatient with the lack of “contact” over the years,
these individuals have moved on to accept a more esoteric concept, that
involving “ultraterrestrials” in a “parallel universe.” These interdimensional
beings are thought to share our own space, but at a different “vibratory lever”
of existence, and that time may have no meaning for them. John A. Keel, one
of the major thinkers in the area, believes that UFOs are “nothing more than
transmogrifications tailoring themselves to our abilities to understand...” and
that the ultraterrestrials “...are somehow able to manipulate the electrical
circuits of the human mind.” (Keel, 1970)
There are so many variations of this “theory,” and each variation has such
loose definitional parameters, that it is difficult to describe in a systematic way.
Some authorities, like Dr. Jacques Vallée, talk of longterm cultural control by
such intelligences, involving the world’s leading religious movements,
miracles, angels, ghosts, fairies, poltergeists, and the like; and they interpret
UFOs as another (but more modern) manifestation of the same phenomena.
Such beliefs are not for all, however. According to Vallée, they are only for
“...those few who have ...graduated to a higher, clearer level of perception of
the total meaning of that tenuous dream that underlies the many nightmares of
human history.” (Vallée, 1969) Others, like Keel, are suspicious of the
ultraterrestrials’ motives, and a few integrate the new theory into their
previously established religious beliefs about good and evil forces.
As with some other areas of the “psychic sciences,” the ultraterrestrial
theory lacks a cohesive synthesis. This is probably because of its (proposed)
nature; there is no way to go about obtaining empirical evidence to support the
hypothesis. That is, there is no “observational window” one can look through to
even evaluate the reasonableness of the hypothesis. The extraterrestrial
hypothesis, on the other hand, does have such an “observational window.” To
see it, one need only step outside at night and look up; the question of whether
or not extraterrestrial visitation is possible can thus be evaluated, based on the
time travel theory data made available through the “window,” and everyone can
usually agree on the data even if they do not always agree on their
interpretation. Even some of the more unlikely UFO theories, such as the
hollow Earth theory, have “observational windows,” thus enabling their
appropriate evaluation.
Although the ultraterrestrial theory has become fashionable in some
European and American UFO circles, and has gathered a substantial following,
it is little known among the public and has had little effect on public opinion.
The Psychic Projection Theory: The psychic projection theory represents a
modern school of thought in UFO circles which, like the ultraterrestrial theory,
developed as a reaction to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The theory was fast
outlined by Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman in the mid-1970s, based loosely
on Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious (Clark and Coleman,
1975).
The authors, however, have gone far beyond Jungian psychology and
postulate that the collective unconscious can psychically project material forms,
represented in modern times by the UFO—with occupants—and that “...the
UFO phenomenon has absorbed many of the ancient archetypal forms in which
human beings have traditionally needed to believe and which they have sought
to complete their world.”
Clark and Coleman see a danger in the modern world of science disrupting
man’s close bond to nature, to mysticism, and to the elements, bringing him to
“the brink of catastrophe.” The message they see in the UFO myth is that the
collective unconscious “...too long repressed, will burst free, overwhelm the
world, and usher in an era of madness, superstition, and terror—with all the
sociopolitical accouterments: war, anarchy, fascism,” and that “... when the
unconscious can no longer be contained, its liberated contents will destroy all
that the conscious mind has produced: the fruits of science and technology,
civilized order, and the very process of reason itself. Under the new imbalance
a spiritual dark age will blanket the earth.”
UFOs, then, are something like “planetary poltergeists” that are generated by
the “psychic energy” of the collective unconscious (and sometimes by an
individual unconscious), as were fairies, flying saucers “spacemen,” and
apparitions of the Virgin Mary.
In some respects, the psychic projection theory relies on the same kinds of
evidence as the ultraterrestrial theory, and it is sometimes difficult to
distinguish between the writings of authorities in the two schools.
The psychic projection theory would have to depend, at the very least, on
both the reality of Jung’s collective unconscious—a kind of reality that Jung
never claimed for it—and the reality of extrasensory perception (ESP). ESP
research is a continuing and active area of research by numerous psychologists,
biologists, and physicists. A very bitter and emotional debate has ensued over
the years concerning the validity of ESP. Some believe that the whole subject is
nonsense and should not be given any serious consideration. Others claim that
ESP effects have been conclusively demonstrated in repeated laboratory
experiments, and that efforts should be directed more toward understanding the
effects than toward attempting to convince the skeptics.
Until the matter is resolved, the psychic projection theory must remain as
simply a fascinating idea. Even if ESP effects (precognition, telepathy,
telekinesis, et cetera) were ultimately demonstrated to be authentic phenomena,
bringing parapsychology into the mainstream of “normal” science, there has
been no indication that such “psychic energy” could actually materialize (i.e.,
project) objects, whether they be fairies or flying saucers.
—J. RICHARD GREENWELL
References
Arnold, Kenneth. “Fireflies and Flying Saucers,” Flying Saucers magazine (November, 1962).
Bernard, Raymond. The Hollow Earth (Fieldcrest Publishing, 1964).
Bova, Ben, and Preiss, Byron, eds. First Contact: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Plume,
1991).
Clark, Jerome, and Coleman, Loren. The Unidentified (Warner Books, 1975).
Constable, Trevor James. Sky Creatures: Living UFOs (Pocket Books, 1978).
———. The Cosmic Pulse of Life (Merlin Press, 1976).
Derr, John. “UFOs and the Hollow Earth Theory,” The APRO Bulletin (November-December, 1970).
Reprinted as the “hollow Earth theory” entry in Story, Ronald D., ed The Encyclopedia of UFOs
Gaddis, Vincent H. Mysterious Fires and Lights (Dell, 1967).
James, Trevor. They Live in the Sky (New Age Publishing, 1958).
Keel, John A. UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
Mattern (no first name given) and Friedrich, Christof. UFO’s: Nazi Secret Weapon? (Samisdat Publishers,
1976).
Sanderson, Ivan T. Invisible Residents (World Publishing, 1970).
———. Uninvited Visitors (Cowles, 1967).
Story, Ronald D. with Greenwell, J. Richard. UFOs and the Limits of Science (Morrow, 1981).
Story, Ronald D., ed. with Greenwell, J. Richard. The Encyclopedia of UFOs (Doubleday/New English
Library, 1980).
U.S. Air Force Technical report No. F-TR-2274-IA, Project “Sign,” Technical Intelligence Division,
Intelligence Department, Air Materiel Command (February, 1949).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia—From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery, 1969).
———. Revelations (Ballatine Books, 1991).
They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (Saucerian Press, 1956).
Gray Barker introduces the term “Men in Black” to describe a mysterious
agency, presumably of the government, which silences UFO witnesses to
conceal the truth about the phenomenon. He tells the stories of six men,
including radio newscaster Frank Edwards, who were supposedly censored or
otherwise silenced when they spoke out about their UFO experiences or
opinions.
They Live in the Sky (New Age Publishing Co., 1959) Trevor James
Constable with this book became the third author (after Charles Fort in 1919
and Meade Layne in 1950) to speculate that many UFOs might be creatures, or
“critters”: amoeba-like animal life in our atmosphere which can materialize at
will. The difference with Constable is that he claims to have photographed
these critters using techniques gleaned from psychic information given him by
an extraterrestrial intelligence.
Those Gods Who Made Heaven and Earth (Editions Robert Laffont,
1969). French author Jean Sendy reinterprets the Biblical story of our planet’s
creation to conclude that an extraterrestrial community of 30 or 40 scientists,
known collectively as the Elohim, came to Earth aboard the Martian moon
Phobos and created a climate-controlled laboratory called the Garden of Eden.
Humans were expelled from Eden when they discovered the Elohim were not
divine after all. Only Noah survived when the Elohim decided to end their
experiment and destroy humankind with an atomic explosion that flooded the
planet.
Threat, The (Simon & Schuster, 1998). Professor David M. Jacobs provides
substantial evidence through the use of hypnotic-regressive interviews with
over 700 alleged abductees that the alien-abduction experiences are primarily
physical ones with the intent of creating hybrids (offspring of mixed Earth and
alien parents).
The report proposes that the secret alien agenda is to integrate the hybrids
into human society and thus take control of planet Earth.
—ETEP STAFF
threat, UFO-ET Whether UFOs and extraterrestrials pose a danger to humanity

is a question that has been answered differently over the various decades of
flying saucer history. The U.S. Air Force investigation of flying saucer reports
from 1948 to 1969 was done specifically under its duty to determine if they
posed a threat to the people of the United States. UFOlogists are fond of
pointing out that the official Air Force explanations of various cases seemed
perfunctory and unconvincing, and that they never even tried to propose
solutions to a certain residuum. What goes unrecognized is the fact that the Air
Force was not approaching flying saucers as a scientific mystery that they had
to solve. They only needed to decide whether the reports pointed to some
enemy of the U.S. engaging in some activity that undermined the nation’s
security.
They didn’t need to solve every case to satisfy themselves that saucers were
not a threat. Nobody was reporting bomb attacks, gunfire, chemical clouds, or
other types of deadly intrusion. Nobody indicated there were parachute drops of
personnel or supplies in preparation for battle. No base was being built inside
our borders. The idea that they were spying on us was undermined by the fact
that most reports were over areas with no evident strategic importance. The
occasional exceptions like reports near Los Alamos or the 1952 Washington
D.C. incidents—when radar blips indicated some sort of entry into restricted air
space near the Capitol and the White House—were troubling in their time, but
retrospectively seem to have been innocuous. The D.C. blips behaved
mindlessly with no evident goal. If any intelligence was gathered by the UFOs
near Los Alamos, it is not evident that it was ever used. No hostile action
followed, nor was there any indication it was used in power brokering.
It is a cliché of UFOlogical rhetoric that if even one UFO report can be
substantiated, the implications are staggering. Unless one regards the idea of
extraterrestrial life as innately intoxicating, this is not absolutely true. What if
the one case involves a pair of Ganymedean tourists taking a scenic route to a
resort spa on Mercury? The practical consequences to humanity would be nil.
The news that extraterrestrial life exists and likes to vacation might be
interesting or amusing, but would hardly be in the same league as news that
aliens are casing out our planet for war and colonization. The latter would truly
be matters for full attention and immediate concern.
If one threw aside all critical judgment and accepted all claims made by
UFOlogists of UFOs killing specifically named people as true, the death toll
would still be less than that caused by everyday hazards. There are many more
reasonable things to worry about than the purported UFO menace.
UFOlogists do worry about such things once in a while and have asked both
the public and the government to share their concerns. What follows is a history
of perceptions and notions about the danger vs. the harmlessness of the UFO
phenomenon and how they have changed through the years.
FRIEND OR FOE
News articles from the first weeks of the UFO mystery do not paint the
picture of a nation gripped by panic. Arnold’s saucers were a source of
fascination and mystery, not one of imminent danger. The Air Force said it
wasn’t anything of ours. The Russians said it wasn’t anything of theirs. So what
were they? Take your pick: transmutations of atomic energy, beer bottle caps
shot out of a blast furnace, secret experiments, tricks of the eye, mirages of
planes, a State Department propaganda ploy to lure us into war, helium-filled
rings to publicize a ring toss game, electrical flying fish from Venus. One
reporter, apparently on a lark, contacted authorities to get a statement about the
invasion. The official said he had not heard of one and directed him to contact
Orson Welles. Witnesses who came forward to corroborate the existence of
flying saucers expressed no fear. One lady spoke of a creepy feeling at seeing a
disk, but even that mild effect is exceptional.
In intelligence circles, rumors surfaced in July of 1947 that saucers spewed
out radioactive clouds that killed animal life, and one scientist wrote to the FBI
claiming saucers might be radio-controlled germ bombs or A-bombs, but these
ideas apparently never became part of the public discourse. Some intelligence
folks recommended in 1948 that the military might be put on alert status, but
cooler heads prevailed. In 1949, a researcher for Project Sign observed that no
damage had yet been attributed to UFOs. One doctor proposed there might
have been a link between a polio epidemic he was treating and the saucer
problem, but authorities quietly discarded the idea. In 1950 a group of scientists
calling themselves the Los Alamos Bird Watchers Association looked into the
possibility of a correlation between radiation and UFO overflights, but nothing
conclusive came of it. (Gross, 1982)
The Mantell tragedy was a pivotal event in early UFO history in that it
began to press the point that something serious was going on. Some rumors
appeared in the papers that radioactivity was found at the crash site. They were
denied, but the absence of a clear answer to the mysterious circumstances
surrounding Mantell’s UFO pursuit and subsequent plane crash was not so easy
to dismiss. Interestingly, however, the concern among UFO buffs was over the
government’s handling of the case and not about trigger-happy aliens. Keyhoe
felt no belligerence was involved. They had merely acted in self-defense.
“Even the stoutest believers in the disks do not think any mass invasion from
space is possible at this time.” (Keyhoe, 1950)
Gerald Heard noted that, until Mantell, saucers always succeeded in getting
out of the way. “They have behaved with a deportment that shows not merely
savoir-faire but real considerateness.” He felt it was puzzling that they threw
away the advantage of surprise if they truly posed a future threat. (Heard, 1951)
Frank Scully echoed the sentiment that there was no belligerence evident in
alien observer actions. His fear was that Earth pilots might attack the saucers
and prompt retaliation against not only the aggressors, but our whole planet.
(Scully, 1950)
Contactees offered contradictory confessions. Orfeo Angelucci’s aliens said
Mantell’s death was unavoidable because he tried to overtake and capture a
“remotely controlled” disk. (Angelucci, 1955) George Adamski’s aliens
regretted the power field effects of a large manned vessel that caused the
“accident.” (Adamski, 1955)
In 1951 a Dr. Anthony Mirarchi was widely quoted as suggesting saucers
came from a potential enemy of the United States. “If they were launched by a
foreign power then they could lead to a worse Pearl Harbor than we have ever
experienced.” He recommended that considerable appropriations be allocated
to conduct a complete investigation. The historical significance of this plea is
open to argument. It may be the first expression of a fear of attack and call for
increased investigation to get wide dissemination, but Mirarchi is not heard
from again in UFO circles, and the call to action is surely ignored. The
reference to Pearl Harbor, however, will recur a decade later in the writings of
the Lorenzens.
Sometime in early 1952 a Rotary Club lecturer took up the subject of flying
saucers. He expressed the belief that they heralded a better life. They
represented a non-hostile invasion from which we might acquire an advanced
science. An informal survey of saucer buffs uniformly got responses that the
saucers were not a menace. They: “come here in peace,” “don’t wish to destroy
us,” had “outgrown war,” had “curiosity,” were afraid to contact us, or would
eventually contact us and give us secrets. (Bender, 1962)
The most telling fact that this was in fact the general attitude occurred in the
wake of the Washington D.C. radar incidents. Al Chop, working at the
Pentagon press desk, said people were writing letters and wiring the President
urging the military not to shoot at the saucers. He asked news writers to please
emphasize to people that pilots in fact were not shooting at the saucers.
Kenneth Arnold resurfaced around this time with his opinions that UFOs
were harmless and probably a living, thinking animal of the stratosphere. The
Coming of the Saucers (1952), the book he co-authored with Ray Palmer,
avoided any final conclusions about flying saucers. They weren’t American or
Russian or Spanish or Argentine, and they saw no substance to claims of
crashed saucers bearing little men from other planets. They presently hoped
that the truth could in time be sifted from the fanciful. All they knew was that
flying saucers may be the “most vitally important fact of our time!”
In 1953 Desmond Leslie and George Adamski offer their contact tale in
Flying Saucers Have Landed. Their message included the sentiment that these
people from other worlds are our friends and wish to ensure the safety and
balance of the other planets in our system. They could impose powerful action
against us, not with weapons, but by manipulating “the natural forces of the
universe.”
Keyhoe’s 1953 book Flying Saucers from Outer Space is a first major step
into the fear that saucers were dangerous. Keyhoe argues with some friends
about the implications of various saucer reports. One of them is a jet pilot
named Jim Riordan who presents a spirited defense of his belief that aliens are
hostile. Repeated surveillance of certain strategic sites leads him to believe: “It
looks as if they are getting ready for an attack...measuring us for a knockout.”
He points to an odd case of a red spray bomb that exploded at Albuquerque,
which he suggests had to be a ranging test for a future attack. Keyhoe offers the
self-admittedly thin suggestion it is only a back-up plan in case we don’t listen
to reason. Keyhoe himself insists there was no proof of hostility: “at least an
even chance they mean us no harm.” The long reconnaissance of Earth was
“possibly nearing its climax...the final act of the saucer drama.” Instead of an
all-out attack, he preferred to believe “the final operation may be entirely
peaceful; if so, it could be of benefit to everyone on earth.”
Herman Oberth, the great German rocket pioneer, offered his opinions about
the saucers in a frequently quoted 1954 article. “They obviously have not come
as invaders, but I believe their present mission may be one of scientific
investigation.” He optimistically suggests the “ultimate result might be
disclosure of secrets [that] otherwise we might not lay bare for a hundred
thousand years.” (Flammonde, 1971)
Harold Wilkins of Britain was notably ambivalent about the hazards of
saucers in his first book, Flying Saucers on the Attack (1954). On one page he
deduces they are “unmistakably hostile” because of evidence of “arson on quite
a large and dangerous scale.” Later, he backpedals and thinks it may just be a
warning. He speaks of death rays wielded by the airplanes, but allows Earth
fliers menacing them could have prompted it. He quotes contactees to the effect
that the aliens are not hostile, but notes they do not desire close contact. They
perhaps see in us “hooligan children” deserving to be “whipped with a rod of
scorpions.” Elsewhere he wonders if they are drawn here to profit from mineral
deposits.
The following year, his sequel Flying Saucers Uncensored (1955) is less
ambivalent. He warns it is folly for any sane man to do more than quietly
investigate given their ethics are unlikely to be ours. Even so, he speculates on
the aggressive tactics a hostile cosmic power might employ and he asserts
seeing “a most disturbing pattern has been slowly built up.” The issue of death
rays reasserts itself and he speaks of a “death ceiling,” in essence a blockade,
having been instituted to prevent us from future flights to the moon and
beyond. Mysterious experiments are performed which causes tears in
everybody in an area in Singapore. Horses are sterilized by atomic radiation.
Humans are abducted for unknown ends, but in pursuing their overlordship
over the Earth, Wilkins suggests they would not need our bodies. It is probably
annihilation of our souls they seek. They might create mutations of humans that
are devoid of divine creativity and dissatisfaction. “Creative art and pure
science, the godlike in man, would die out.” They might be throwing “a cosmic
monkey wrench into our terrestrial wheels” to derail our use of atomic
weaponry and supersonic aircraft. Activity along the Martian canals, he
worries, might indicate they are contemplating an invasion of Earth. Dangerous
or not, Wilkins is certain they have conducted a pole-to-pole survey of our
world. We can only “watch, wait, collate, and synthesize.”
In The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955), Donald Keyhoe began to accept
that the saucers were in fact hostile, as Riordan said they were. He began to
collect phenomena that could be interpreted as alien attacks. A Walesville plane
crash indicates the use of heat beams. Skyquakes indicate the use of focused
sound waves. A hole in a billboard becomes evidence of a missile from outer
space. The Seattle windshield pitting epidemic is regarded as retaliation for
Earth space activities. The disappearance of Flight 19 becomes evidence that
aliens are abducting humans. Keyhoe admits the absence of an all-out takeover
is a problem he doesn’t have an answer for. His friend Redell gets the final
word and proposes the disappearances are to acquire people who can teach
them our language before they make contact.
Morris Jessup is ambivalent from his study of the phenomenon. He sees
them as exploratory missions that sometime engage in experiments and the
capture of specimens. Though they catch planes and cause occasional storms
and deluges, he still thinks we should not be astonished if it turns out that space
dwellers are preparing to prevent fear-stricken human beings from blowing up
another planet. (Jessup, 1955)
Waveney Girvan felt more evidence would exist if saucers truly represented
hostile invasion. People feared the saucers because they forced a new
dimension in our thinking. They offend the climate of our age, but he felt they
brightened it up a little as well. The large proportion of reports proved the
visitors were peaceful and friendly and far from hostile. (Girvan, 1955)
One UFOlogist around this time offered the revelation that the craft were not
only friendly, they were helping clear our environment of radiation released in
atomic bomb blasts. (Moseley, 1956) It turns out this had been advanced in
contactee circles, specifically Mark Probert’s Inner Circle for some time. There
is even a news item dating back to the 1947 Wave in which a San Francisco
zany claimed astral contact with the Dhyanis, rulers of creation, who were
dropping “metaboblons” into our atmosphere to counteract atomic radiation.
(Bloecher, 1967) This is likely a garbling of metabolons, a word in brief use
around 1910 to label the fragments of atoms in radioactivity before they were
better understood as protons, neutrons, and electrons. The Dhyanis had not kept
up in their reading.
Aimé Michel in The Truth about Flying Saucers (1956) advanced
contradictory opinions about the nature of the saucer problem. In one place he
says it is essential to find out what they are, for if they are real a sword of
Damocles hangs over our heads: “the destiny of our planet is assuredly at
stake.” Later, he proclaims “their inoffensive nature is a certainty. If we are
being visited, it is by beings whose courtesy and tact need no further
illustration. We could learn from them, in addition to their knowledge, a lesson
in respect for others. With all the power at their disposal, they have never once
attempted to interfere in our affairs.” He goes on to suggest that they are fearful
of the murderous tendencies evident in all our great enterprises. He felt the
American investigations had proved nothing. Further investigation, and a little
more human effort, would make the difference. “The mystery would be
fathomed very soon, if we really tried.”
Michel’s sequel, Flying Saucers and the Straight Line Mystery (1958),
advanced orthoteny as a mortal blow to the idea that saucers were a collective
psychopathology. The threads provided by orthoteny now meant there was no
question a Sword of Damocles had been hanging over our heads. Why it had
not fallen yet was unexplained, but the blow will be fatal. Their landing would
lead to the extinction of mankind because of our inferior ethics.
How very different is the conclusion of Bryant and Helen Reeves’ contactee
study Flying Saucer Pilgrimage (1957). The aliens are regarded as Guardians
who will never offer coercion or assistance, but are servants of the Light,
masters of energy, and are “balanced” beings. While ill-intentioned beings
exist, the Guardians prevent their passage to our world. The overall picture is
deemed “very progressive and inspiring.”
Leonard Stringfield’s Saucer Post—3-0 Blue (1957) is a portrait of
uncertainty. In November of 1955 he had offered the case for interplanetary
war, but he changed his mind. UFOs seemed to behave menacingly in certain
cases, yet a superior culture could clearly be capable of planeticide and mass
harm. Acts of UFO violence exist, but hostility seems highly debatable.
Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) added to
the growing sense that malevolence was associated with UFO phenomena.
These things may mean to do us harm and may or may not be shooting at us
with rays from underground. This doesn’t alarm him too greatly, since he feels
we are bound to find some defense against it. What disturbs him is that some
agency is trying to prevent us from learning about their existence and might
come knocking at the door. An acquaintance with the name T. James was
suggesting to him aliens might be “downright evil.”
Two holdouts against the trend to see aliens as troublesome were Max B.
Miller and Gavin Gibbons. Miller was still in the sway of the contactee faction
and felt they conveyed “fraternal friendship and understanding.” Their effects
were “positive and constructive.” (Miller, 1958) Gibbons was more influenced
by the early Keyhoe. “They are not hostile,” he affirms. He fully expected them
to land en masse in the near future based on patterns of activity he chronicled.
“They will certainly bring benefits,” he predicts. “We must, all of us, welcome
these beings who are taking so much trouble to bring the news of a good life to
this planet.” (Gibbons, 1958)
Reviewing the UFO myth in 1958, Carl Jung noted the contradictory strands
developing in it. According to some, the visitors held superior wisdom and
wanted to save humanity; but other aliens were carrying off people, as in the
case of Flight 19, according to others. Some affirm their benevolence, but that
harmlessness was “recently doubted.” To Jung, the flights didn’t appear based
on any recognizable system. If anything, they were like tourists
unsystematically viewing the landscape. (Jung, 1958,1959)
Robert Dickhoff’s Homecoming of the Martians (1958, 1964) might be
dismissed as obscure, little-read and lightly veiled fiction. Yet it is a treasure.
According to his conscious mythology, “Germ-invaders” swept down from
space in the past and “begat life or a parody thereof” in a variety of forms that
included the ape-men mentalities. Aghartan teachers have through the centuries
been rendering them a harmless and controlled reality. In the present, a super-
brain a.k.a. God-Brain-Head, produced by manipulated biological engineering,
exists for which robot-crews and scientists with gangster throwback mentalities
travel through space. They “spacenap” earthlings and gather blood for the
Brain’s nourishment.
By the end of the decade, Keyhoe is fully convinced that UFOs are a danger.
The creation of NICAP was directed to the end of proving wrong the Air
Force’s conclusion that UFOs were no threat. Delmar Fahmey, at NICAP’s
creation, stated there was “an urgent need to know the facts.” (Ruppelt, 1956).
To that end they would pester the Air Force for release of all their files. They
called for Congressional hearings to acknowledge the reality of the saucer
problem. Keyhoe wanted an all-out drive to communicate with the aliens—to
convince them we wouldn’t try to invade other worlds. Congress would be
obliged to force a crash program for our defense against aliens. (Keyhoe, 1960)
That the Air Force refused to release their files is a fact. Ruppelt said they
planned to ignore NICAP, because they knew their independent review would
nitpick every case. If the bird, balloon or plane hadn’t been caught and a signed
confession wrung out, they would call it a spaceship. They knew from earlier
experiences what to expect: “Many of the inquiries came from saucer
screwballs and these people are like a hypochondriac at the doctor’s; nothing
will make them believe the diagnosis unless it is what they came to hear. And
there are plenty of saucer screwballs. One officer summed it up neatly when he
told me, ‘It isn’t the UFOs that give us the trouble, it’s the people’.” (Ruppelt,
1956)
INVASION AND INFECTION
The sixties were a manic time for UFO belief. Flying saucers were so real,
only the most bigoted skeptic could deny advanced metallic piloted machines
were flying around—a potential threat to the security of the world. Everyone
felt something had to be done. Most of all, the authorities should openly admit
the reality of the problem.
Book titles convey some of the mood of the period: Flying Saucers: The
Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space; Flying Saucers are
Hostile; Flying Saucer Invasion—Target Earth; Flying Saucers—Serious
Business; The Real UFO Invasion; The Terror Above Us. The teaser on The
Official Guide to UFOs promised “Exclusive! First News of America’s Most
Terrifying UFO Invasion!” Wilkins’ books return with arch blurbs asking “Are
they Friendly Visitors from Outer Space or Invaders Planning Conquest?” and
“Is there a cosmic battle plan aimed at Earth?” The actual content was less
dramatic than advertised, but that hardly mattered. The conviction of urgency
transcended the material gathered for proof.
Throughout the first half of the decade, Keyhoe’s NICAP pressed for
Congressional hearings on the UFO problem by such tactics as letter-writing
campaigns. The Air Force warned congressmen such hearings would only
dignify the problem and cause more publicity, thus adding to the problem.
NICAP also published a book called The UFO Evidence (edited by Richard
Hall) and sent copies to congressmen to put forward their case that UFOs were
in fact real and posed a danger to the fabric of society. The danger included an
unprepared public being caught up in widespread panic if an external danger
was suddenly imposed. A sudden confrontation with extraterrestrials could
have disastrous results, they warned. Among them, “catastrophic results to
morale.”
While NICAP found some support for their position in Congress, nothing
happened until the infamous “swamp gas” fiasco caused a loss of credibility in
the Air Force’s handling of the UFO problem. On April 5, 1966, Congress held
open hearings. This led to the creation of the Condon Committee to undertake a
new investigation—in essence, to get a second opinion of the Air Force’s
diagnosis. Keyhoe rejoiced, calling it “the most significant development in the
history of UFO investigation.”
Condon confirmed the diagnosis: “We know of no reason to question the
finding of the Air Force that the whole class so far considered does not pose a
defense problem.” While critics carped on the inability of the committee to
solve all the cases they studied, the issue of their agreeing with the absence of a
threat went unnoticed. The cases in the report don’t suggest much violence
beyond the guy who was purportedly burned from a blast of hot gasses expelled
by a saucer as it started spinning up for takeoff (the Michalak case). Even if
you accept the story—investigators didn’t—there is no hint that the harm was
intentional.
The writings of the Lorenzens were required reading in the sixties. Flying
Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space (1966)
builds on the Keyhoe thesis that UFOs are engaged in reconnaissance. They are
painstakingly mapping the geographical features of our country and testing our
defense capabilities. The 1952 Washington D.C. incidents are regarded as
accidental incursions by aliens mistaking the capitol and White House for
military installations. The Lorenzens expect they will be setting up bases since
the taking of plants, boulders, and soil samples probably means they are testing
what sort of agriculture they should establish. The Ubatuba explosion is
regarded as self-destruction to prevent superior technology from getting into
our hands and revealing its secrets. There is a bare possibility it was an atomic
explosion. “UFOs are powerful radioactive sources.” The dangers they pose
extend to the possibility that our next war could involve “all nations fighting as
brothers against a com mon foe from outer space.” (Lorenzen, 1966)
They showcase the ideas of Dr. Olavo Fontes that UFOs possessed weapons
like heat rays and a device that inhibited the function of petrol engines. They
claim priority, however, that the observations UFOs made of cars and planes in
the early years were done in order to devise these antimachine machines to
disable propulsion systems.
A pattern of reconnaissance is seen which suggests to them that aliens plan
to release sleeping drugs into strategic reservoirs and water tanks as a means of
bringing the world to its knees in a matter of hours. They are concerned there
are too many blackouts on our power grids. There are also people disappearing.
Is this the procuring of specimens? Add to this the case of a woman with
medical problems they interpret as radiation effects. No person of conscience
can ignore the UFO problem in the light of all this. The UFO problem has to be
taken out of the hands of the military who are lulling us into a false sense of
security and given to an international commission who will handle this red-hot
political problem.
“We are in urgent need of the acquisition and objective analysis of basic
data.” We are facing potential danger. Maybe they aren’t hostile, but “there is
no indication of friendliness either... The existence of a species of superior
beings in the universe could cause the civilization of Earth to topple.” This
urgency “defies expression.” We must be anxious to relearn the lessons of
history: Billy Mitchell, Maginot, Pearl Harbor, and so on.
Flying Saucer Occupants (1967), the next offering by the Lorenzens, is less
suffused with fear. It is primarily a survey of non-contactee UFOnaut reports.
As such it is a mixed bag open to a variety of interpretations from “conquerors
from space” and “members of a military organization” to “a breeding
experiment” to simply “visitors.” While they prefer to simply assert the reality
of these aliens, they admit in the final paragraph an alternative theory: “The
population of the world is falling victim to a particularly insidious and
apparently contagious mental disease which generates hallucinations involving
specific types of airships and humanoids. This disease seems to be spreading.
Who will be next to contract the malady? You?”
The choice of metaphor is interesting and was itself infectious. It turns up in
the writings of J. Allen Hynek for one. In an article for Playboy he asserts that
if an intensive investigation were carried out for a year and yielded nothing, we
could shrug off the UFO problem with, “There must have been a virus going
around.” In The UFO Experience (1972), he asks, “Are then, all these reporters
of UFOs truly sick? If so, what is the sickness? Are these people all affected by
some strange ‘virus’ that does not affect ‘sensible’ people? What a strange
sickness this must be, attacking people in all walks of life, regardless of
training and vocation, and making them, for a very limited of time—only
minutes sometimes—behave in a strange way and see things that are belied by
the reliable and stable manner and actions they exhibit in the rest of their lives.”
Gordon Creighton offered the longest exposition of this metaphor in The
Humanoids (1966):
One thing at least is certain. These stories of alleged meeting with

denizens of other worlds or realms or levels of existence constitute a
fascinating social, psychological—and possibly also a parapsychological
enigma. And surely an enigma of some urgency, for if the growing numbers
of people all over our planet who claim these experiences are indeed
hallucinating, or, as we are confidently told, suffering from the stresses and
strains of the Nuclear age, then it is plain as a pikestaff that they are in
grave need of psychological study and medical attention. If a brand new
psychosis is loose amongst us, then, instead of wasting so much time on
why we hate our fathers and love our mothers, our mental experts and
psychologists ought to have been there right from the start, studying and
combating this new plague since its outbreak nearly twenty years ago!
Valuable time has been lost. By now, they might have come to important
conclusions, or even licked the malady!
Even rendered in these facetious terms the imperative quality of the UFO
problem is retained in the overwrought choice of words like plague and grave
need. Aimé Michel also utilized the disease metaphor in suggesting the alien
“dominate us only to the degree that the microbe dominates us when we are
ill.”
UFOs Over the Americas, the Lorenzens’ 1968 title, is more suffused with
confusion than fear. They note a new phase of UFO activity involving car
chases. A new observation is advanced that UFOs show a proclivity to be
sighted near cemeteries. They speculate this is just their way of trying to figure
out what funeral processions might be about. They criticize the scientific
community for holding the position that UFOs show “no intelligent pattern of
behavior; they zip hither and yon but don’t seem to be going anywhere.” Yet
elsewhere they observe “the extraterrestrials’ motivations and overall purpose
are so well concealed as to suggest a deliberate attempt to confuse.” They call
for a UN sponsored agency to look into the matter, yet they also predict UFOs
would appear so constantly that “it should be evident before the end of 1968
just what UFOs are.”
Alas, their 1969 volume UFOs—The Whole Story was unable to proclaim
what that evident identity was. The concern over invasion drops away, replaced
by assumptions of aloofness. The stoppage of vehicles is downgraded from
weapons-testing activity to a means of studying humans at a more leisurely
pace. The fears vanish in favor of discussions of UFO politics and UFOnauts
being time-travelers.
The writings of Frank Edwards were the bestselling books of the sixties.
Edwards is sometimes dismissed as a journalist and not a UFOlogist, in part
because of the embarrassing errors he made. The substance of the books
however is heavily indebted to Keyhoe and NICAP. The flyleaf of Flying
Saucers—Serious Business (1966) is notable for a flying saucer health warning
that epitomizes the fearful spirit of the decade:
WARNING!
Near approaches of Unidentified Flying Objects can be harmful to
human beings. Do not stand under a UFO that is hovering at low
altitude. Do not touch or attempt to touch a UFO that has landed. In
either case, the safe thing to do is get away from there quickly and
let the military take over. There is a possibility of radiation danger,
and there are known cases in which persons have been burned by
rays emanating from UFOs. Details on these cases are included in
this book.
Edwards’ book affirms the reality of cases involving “eye damage, burns,
radioactivity, partial or temporary paralysis, and various types of physiological
disturbances.” He talks of heat waves and stun rays; and the relationship
between UFOs and blackouts is explored at length. “They have shown the
ability, and sometimes the apparent inclination, to interfere with or prevent the
functioning of our electrical and electronic systems.” Despite these hints of
malevolence, Edwards proclaims at the finale that contact will be the “the
greatest experience of the human race.”
The sequel Flying Saucers—Here and Now (1967) was spawned by the
incredible increase in saucer sightings and saucer interest in the middle of the
decade. Writings that, in cooler times, would have stimulated half a dozen
letters now filled bags at magazine offices. Besides chronicling the rush of
unfolding events, the book includes James McDonald’s call for a full-scale
Congressional investigation. Edwards maintains UFOs are not hostile, but
warns contact will have tremendous impact theologically, psychologically, and
sociologically. And that contact is described as imminent.
George Fawcett surveyed UFO cases for repetitive features in a February
1965 article. (See FAWCETT’S “REPETITIONS”) Among his catalogue of
commonalities were the phenomena of pursuit, cases of increased background
radiation, cases of electrical shock, burns, dimming of vision, blackouts,
temporary paralysis, and hostile acts. In April 1968, he cites dozens of UFO
chases, a half-dozen deaths attributed to close encounters, and numerous
instances of electromagnetic interference with machinery. He laments that it
“may already be too late” for our government to act on the UFO problem. Their
crossing of international boundaries could result in “an accidental World War
III by mistake.” He adds his voice to chorus of people calling for the
verification of UFO reality: “The growing UFO problem worldwide must be
solved in 1968 or the explosive situation of UFOs may easily get out of our
control and reap a ‘real’ disaster beyond all imagination. A worldwide probe of
this problem is long overdue and should be handled through the United
Nations.”
The works of Jacques Vallée are a must in every UFOlogist’s library. His
first book Anatomy of a Phenomenon: The Detailed and Unbiased Report on
UFOs (1965) remains one of the most dispassionate overviews of the UFO
mystery attempted and is virtually beyond reproach. The conclusion of the
study is sheer poetry: “The contours of a complex intelligence can be discerned
and our dreams have reached across the night. The sky will never be the same.”
Keyhoe had said essentially the same thing in his first book, but Vallée had the
better sensibility of where it belonged for maximum effect.
Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma (1966), Vallée’s next book, drifts
into the fear mentality of the era. There is a call for verification by means of the
creation of an international scientific commission to separate out those
elements that are the work of imagination from those that constitute the
physical basis of the phenomenon. The challenges they pose are “unwelcome”
and “disturbing,” but must be addressed because “our own existence will be
dependent upon the sincerity with which we conduct this research.” This
flirtation with fear is gone by Passport to Magonia (1969) where entity
behavior is dismissed as consistently absurd and misleading. The search for
answers may be futile for they may only constitute a dream that never existed
in reality.
Brad Steiger’s books are rich sources of threatening themes. The call for
verification appears in Strangers from the Skies (1966) with a recommendation
for an “objective and respected panel” to appraise the situation. UFOs create
blackouts and that ability makes national defense “a bad joke.” The Lorenzens’
notion that UFOs might beam down hypnotic drugs into our drinking water gets
repeated. More creatively, Steiger offers the thought that one incident involves
galactic experiments in cremation. It seemed UFOs were ready to invade the
U.S. on a full scale. “We must be prepared to establish peaceful communication
or be prepared to accept annihilation.” Much more could be cited, but the books
basically hash over the same sort of material as Edwards, the Lorenzens, and
Fawcett.
John Fuller’s writings are equally rich sources of malevolence. The familiar
themes of blackouts and physiological reactions and mechanical breakdowns
recur, as does the call for verification by means of a “scientific investigation on
a major scale.” This is “urgently” needed because of the “startling, alarming,
and dangerous material” surfacing. There is “mounting seriousness.” He
devotes a whole book on the Betty Hill case, which is notably involved in fear
of radiation poisoning, a secret abduction, and a nightmarish operation
involving a needle thrust in a woman’s navel with no prior anesthesia.
One the more interesting fears appeared in an article written by J. Allen
Hynek shortly after his conversion in the wake of the humiliating swamp gas
affair. Hynek expressed worry that the Russians might solve the mystery with
results that would “shake America so hard that the launching of Sputnik in
1957 would appear in retrospect as important as a Russian announcement of a
particularly large wheat crop.” Hynek felt a Russian colleague slipped when he
revealed Russian scientists were not permitted to discuss UFOs. They may have
been “studying with dispassionate thoroughness for years.” This suggested that
official denials of their reality were a cover.
Jerome Clark offered one of the more paradoxical reactions to Hynek’s
swamp gas statement. He took issue with the comment that a dismal swamp is a
most unlikely place for a visit from space. Clark avers, contrarily, it is the most
likely place since they could go there without being seen. They go to fantastic
lengths to prevent us from knowing what they are doing. This included killing a
whole village of people in one incident and the erasing of people’s memories in
other cases. He berates the idea that injuries are caused in self-defense as inane.
Noting that we have tried to force UFOs down, he remarks that we have been
treating them with more respect than they deserve. The change of attitude from
the 50s when UFOs possessed savior-faire is nowhere more strikingly
illustrated.
The call for verification turns up again as the subject of a resolution drafted
during a 1967 gathering of UFO buffs. They proclaim that UFOs are identified
vehicles from outer space and that this is a question of a vital problem
concerning the whole world. “All nations must unite in mutual research and
scientific cooperation to investigate and solve this for the common cause and
mutual advancement of our peaceful relationship in outer space.”
The theme turns up in several variations during the Roush Congressional
hearings on July 29, 1968. James McDonald wanted a pluralistic approach
employing NASA, NSA, ONR, and even the Federal Power Commission—the
last to take up the subject of blackouts. J. Allen Hynek wanted Congress to
establish a UFO Scientific Board of Inquiry. James A. Harder wanted a
multifaceted approach, preferably at several institutions simultaneously. Robert
M. Baker wanted a well-funded program with the highest possible standards.
Donald Menzel, ever the skeptic, thought the time and money would be
completely wasted in such studies.
Towards the end of 1968 the Rand Document recommended a central
collection agency with analysis given over to specialists. The last significant
expression of this notion appears in 1973, when James McDonald recommends
setting up a two-phased research effort: Phase 1, price-tagged at $4 million,
would “confirm absolutely the existence of UFOs in scientific terms and
identify any advanced technologies.” Phase 2 would define the new technology
and was price-tagged in the $75-million to $100-million range. Needless to
add, nobody leaped forward to fund this idea. People complained the half-
million dollars for the Condon commission was a waste.
The concern over invasion spawned some spectacular notions in Raymond
Palmer’s The Real UFO Invasion (1967). Palmer offered evidence that the U.S.
was preparing for war with weapons so titanic they couldn’t have been intended
for a mere international war. That war was not in the future either. Palmer
points to nuclear blasts in Project Argus as being against a satellite not made by
earthmen.
Gordon Lore’s Strange Effects from UFOs: A Special NICAP Report (1969),
Robert Loftin’s Identified Flying Saucers (1968), and Otto Binder’s What We
Really Know About Flying Saucers (1967) deserve brief mention for their brief
treatments of physiological effects from saucers: eye injuries, radiation burns,
paralyses, cases of shock, and mysterious blows to the body. A particularly odd
and problematic case could made for including Vincent Gaddis’ Mysterious
Fires and Lights (1967), since it makes an effort to link UFOs to spontaneous
human combustion. Unforgettable is Gaddis’ question, “Are We Walking Atom
Bombs?”
Passing references should perhaps be given to John Keel’s expression of
alarm over the 1966 wave and Robert Loftin’s speaking of the UFO threat as
something we had better get the truth about “before it is too late.” One should
perhaps resist recalling some thematically similar material from a weird little
magazine that haunted the newsstands in the period called Beyond, but they are
delightful flourishes. Otto Binder fretted over the number of deaths that were
taking place in the UFO field in one article. Timothy Green Beckley acclaimed
“UFOs Use High-tension Lines for Re-Charging.” James Welling offered a
doubtful piece, “Does UFO Radiation Cause Phoenix, Arizona, Residents to be
Afflicted with Strange Malady—Why Does Press Not Report Epidemic of
Electronic Poisoning?” Other articles to find haven in Beyond discussed aliens
that probed brains, paralyzed observers, and even made a dog sick with some
ghastly condition.
UFOlogists are a heterogeneous bunch, and lack of full consensus is always
to be expected. Donald Hanlon felt UFOnauts “do comparatively little harm”
even if one counts a case of a use of knockout vapor. Charles Bowen spoke of
the pointlessness of alien activity and thought it all “diversionary play to give
us a giggle.” Otto Binder, Cleary-Baker, and Mervyn Paul emphasized the
paradox over why aliens didn’t wipe us out years ago if they had bad things
planned now. John Keel called for an investigation unhampered by petty UFO
cultists and lamented the absence of a suitable psychiatric program to serve
those being made insane or attempting suicide from the confusing antics of the
UFO phenomenon. Such differences as these do nothing to inhibit calling the
period of the sixties as overwhelmingly dominated by fears that UFOs were a
danger to individual humans and to mankind collectively.
SHAMS AND SHEPHERDS
The last significant expression of the fear of invasion of this period appears
in Raymond Fowler’s UFOs—Interplanetary Visitors (1974). It is casually
presented as a possibility among a range of intentions that aliens might possess.
The idea of friendly contact is raised, but it is muted by concerns over loss of
national pride as allegiance is transferred to a superior force. In a chapter archly
titled “The Impact—Disintegration or Survival?” the existence of unprovoked
hostile acts is pondered as either unwarranted aggression or an amoral act
comparable to the swatting of a fly. Fowler believed the American military
complex had treated UFOs as a threat, but would be helpless if they proved to
be enemies. The blackouts, abductions, attacks and burns associated with UFOs
help to demonstrate that super-intelligent aliens are becoming an intimate part
of our environment to which we will have to adapt.
Ralph and Judy Blum’s Beyond Earth (1974) asserts UFOs may be the “the
biggest story ever,” but they are not sure if they are extraterrestrial or “living
holograms projected on the sky by the laser beams of man’s unconscious
mind.” The tone is decidedly upbeat with suggestions that UFOs might
represent “an almost unimaginable energy source for mankind.” They also have
a habit of unorthodox healing, a converse of all the ills alleged in the prior
decade. The Blums quote Hynek’s opinion that UFOnauts indulge in
“seemingly pointless antics,” and they include James Harder’s response to a
question about whether UFOs pose a threat: “If you pick up a mouse in a
laboratory situation, it’s very frightening for the mouse. But it doesn’t mean
you meant the mouse any harm.”
Robert Emenegger’s UFOs: Past, Present, and Future (1974) also took an
upbeat view of UFOs. Contacts were friendly and he concurred with the Air
Force that they posed no threat. Understanding UFOs could lead to the
discovery of a new energy source and a new relationship to life throughout the
universe. Fantastic revelations to questions that have puzzled philosophers
throughout history were near, and he hoped a reputable organization like the
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the National Academy
of Sciences would move forward to study the phenomenon. “The immediate
future looks promising.”
In a December 1974 editorial for Flying Saucer Review, Charles Bowen
warned that people should endeavor to avoid physical contact, because UFOs
have been shown to cause harm. There is perhaps a struggle for possession of
our planet between good and evil forces, but UFOs may not be greatly
concerned with the ultimate welfare of the human race. Noting how much the
phenomenon trades in gibberish, Bowen laments “Hoaxing, we feared, was not
the prerogative of earth men.”
Hynek and Vallée’s The Edge of Reality (1975) posits that “there appears to
be no desire for involvement with the human race.” While UFOs are
documented as causing harm, it is observed that electrical outlets also cause
harm without being innately hostile. The study of UFOs is regarded as an
opportunity to move to a new reality. New departures in methodology will,
however, be needed. The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) will be set up to
serve those ends.
The same general sentiment appears in Vallée’s The Invisible College
(1975). UFOs are indifferent to the welfare of the individual and pose no threat
to national defense. The primary impact of UFOs appears to be on human
belief. Could it be someone is playing a fantastic trick on us?
The Lorenzens answer with a big yes. “Somebody is putting us on!” UFO
encounters are in sense a charade. They also, however, appear to involve coldly
scientific experiments on some humans. They may be trying to stock some
distant exotic zoo. There is a threat from UFOs after all, despite government
assurances, but not from invasion. Fortunately this threat is avoidable,
according to the Lorenzens. Stay away from lovers’ lanes and isolated camping
sites. They argue the time has come to “educate the aliens” with radio
broadcasts inviting them to visit openly.
John Keel decides in The Mothman Prophecies (1975) that the battle cry of
the phenomenon is “Make him look like a nut!” He muses after Fort, “If there
is a universal mind, must it be sane?” The “worldwide spread of UFO belief
and its accompanying disease” fills him with great consternation.
In The Eighth Tower (1975) the dangerous character of the UFO
phenomenon is played up with talk of a high rate of death among contactees
and UFO hobbyists. Keel adds, “Any force that can sear your eyeballs, paralyze
your limbs, erase your memory, burn your skin, and turn you into a coughing,
blubbering wreck can also maim and kill you.” It is dispassionate and ruthless.
We are puppets to the super-spectrum.
In bizarre contrast, Hans Holzer rejects “monster” theories of aliens bent on
destroying us. They may regard themselves as potential saviors. Their attempts
at crossbreeding suggest we are “not totally unworthy.” Brad Steiger believed
UFOs would be a transformative symbol that will unite our entire species into
one spiritual organism. They would be the spiritual midwife that brings about
mankind’s starbirth into the universe. Paris Flammonde, on the other hand,
takes the view that man will never achieve inter-communication or a symbiotic
relationship with extraterrestrials.
The Hynek UFO Report (1977) reflects the emerging consensus. UFO study
could perhaps “be the springboard to a revolution in man’s view of himself and
his place in the universe.” Yet, they also appear to be “playing games with us.”
D. Scott Rogo similarly felt UFOs demonstrate that our world plays host to a
force that seeks to mystify us.
Bill Barry’s account of the Travis Walton controversy evaluates the
phenomenon as having never expressed hostility towards its alleged victims.
Abductees are merely treated as guinea pigs.
As in his book in the fifties, Leonard Stringfield’s Situation Red—The UFO
Siege (1978) is a portrait of confusion. Looking at airplane accidents,
disappearances, and persistent spying, he admits to being stumped by the
pointless harassment. UFO activity resembles a military strike force, but the
randomness and absence of widespread destruction falls short of open hostility.
If they wanted to destroy our civilization, clearly they could. Their effects are
sometimes deleterious and sometimes beneficial. The paradox may be sinister
or profound, but the main point is that it remains unresolved.
Art Gatti’s UFO Encounters of the 4h Kind (1978) focuses on sexual
incursions and he feels they, at minimum, show aliens are questionably
motivated. Maybe they are curious. Maybe they are milking our emotions like
cattle. Maybe they involve two forces; one benevolent, the other wicked.
Maybe they are seeding Earth with warriors for a future Armageddon.
Brad Steiger’s Alien Meetings (1978) comes across as a curious regression
to the fears of the sixties. One chapter head warns “UFO Encounters May Be
Hazardous to Your Health!” After a survey of the usual troubles, he offers
motives like invasion, domination, territorial acquisition, and commercial
exploitation, but manages to dismiss the “War of the Worlds” idea as “paranoid
mutterings.” Perhaps this indicates some progress over his books of the sixties,
given that he did pose the possibility seriously then. Whether they are on some
spiritual mission or merely pursuing history lessons, aliens at least seem to be
intensely interested in us.
Rogo and Clark’s Earth’s Secret Inhabitants (1979) sees the phenomenon as
a source both of good things like raised IQs and healings, plus bad things like
burns and radiation effects. It provides us with visions of things humans want
to believe. “In fact, up to a certain point it may be a good thing for us to believe
in these things—providing, of course, that we don’t become so superstitious in
the process that we lose our grip on common sense. Maybe they are clues to
some larger truth.” Vallée’s Messengers of Deception (1979) essentially shows
that losing one’s grip on common sense is the usual result of UFO belief. As
such, he felt it could be a useful political tool and agent of social control. On
the brighter side, UFO study might clarify exciting theoretical and practical
opportunities to understand energy and information.
In 1979 Yurko Bondarchuk foresaw imminent contact with extraterrestrials
(before the year 2000). “It is inconceivable that their journeys to a peripheral
planet are merely haphazard or mindless.” They are surveying our self-
destructive capabilities and our resource base. He expects contact to lead to the
emergence of a “new world order” in which existing territorial and ideological
conflicts will be gradually eliminated. Creation of a restructured world
economic order eventually follows. A universal reevaluation of spiritual
convictions could also be expected. Raymond Fowler similarly speculates
UFOs represent a “much-needed bridge between science and religion.” The
events of The Andreasson Affair (1979) strike him as a stage-managed religious
experience by interstellar missionaries. Betty Andreasson and others like her
have been primed subconsciously with information that might burst into
consciousness all over the planet.
FUN OR RUN
Rogo, in UFO Abductions (1980), confesses the whole UFO abduction

syndrome appears to be “slightly ridiculous.” There is too much
misinformation that appears designed to makes abductees look like “total
fools.” His guess is that these experiences are an elaborate façade, a
camouflage forcing the individual to confront a secret aspect of himself. Rogo’s
book includes Ann Druffel’s article “Harrison Bailey and the Flying Saucer
Disease” that chronicled the medical misadventures of a man who said he was
told his internal organs were three times older than they should have been.
Druffel diagnoses his problems as resulting from microwave radiation in an
UFO encounter. Druffel doesn’t know if Bailey was harmed accidentally or
deliberately, but Bailey thinks it was unintentional. In The Tujunga Canyon
Contacts (1980) she opts for a view of UFOs as looking after man’s continuing
evolution. They take a special interest in our procreative activities or they are
interested in expanding our consciousness.
The Proceedings of the First International UFO Congress (1980) presents
views typical of the seventies. Leo Sprinkle thinks contact messages are
seemingly reliable because of their similarities to each other and thus offer
information on the scientific and spiritual development of humankind. Berthold
Schwarz thinks the messages are garbage. Frank Salisbury remarks that UFOs
seem too irrational and perverse—they verge on the truly diabolical. Jim
Lorenzen characterizes the phenomenon as an insult to human intelligence, but
Stanton Friedman begs to disagree.
In their study of several abductees, Judith and Alan Gransberg reported there
was not one where the extraterrestrials were cruel to humans. Indeed, one
abductee thought they were angels. They conclude, in contrast to Vallée, the
concept of extraterrestrials is doing man no harm and could potentially be
helpful.
Raymond Fowler continues ruminating on the Andreasson affair in
Casebook of a UFO Investigator (1981), but in a somewhat larger context. He
thinks that super-intelligent beings have possibly been nurturing man along his
evolutionary way. We are under intense attention, perhaps as potential
candidates for the intergalactic community. They love mankind. In The
Andreasson Affair—Phase Two, he reaffirms the religionist slant of phase one,
and this includes the millennial expectation that the Second Coming of Jesus
Christ will happen during the adult lives of Bob and Betty Luca.
UFO by Milt Machlin with Tim Beckley is an interesting minor work having
some regressive concerns. An odd case of a UFO murder is recounted in which
people were killed either because they knew too much or they were being
experimented upon. It closes with a flying saucer health warning that is
charming in its simple tone: “Do not approach UFOs. People get shocks or
even end up in the hospital. You could also get hit by a ray gun.”
The appearance of Budd Hopkins’ Missing Time (1981) represents a
significant albeit ambivalent return to the UFO menace mindset. Hopkins
regards abductions as an epidemic, but because people are protected by an
induced anmesia it may be almost entirely invisible. He writes: “I do not
believe the UFO phenomenon is malign or evilly intentioned. I fear, instead,
that it is merely indifferent, though I fervently hope to be proven wrong.” He
adds, “For all any of us knows the whole UFO phenomenon may be ultimately
blissfully benign—there is firm evidence for this position—and so having been
abducted may turn out to be a peculiar privilege.” Even so, he is “thoroughly
alarmed” and calls for the establishment of a UFO investigatory arm to the
United Nations, so that everyone would recognize UFOs as a serious reality to
the governments of the world. The contradiction between his alarm and the
consensus of the prior decade he has trouble abandoning is unresolved.
Brad Steiger’s Star People (1981) and The Seed (1983) is basically
contactee literature for the eighties crowd. John Magor’s Aliens Above, Always
(1983) also has the paternalistic quality of contacteeism: they are watching us
for our benefit. Cynthia Hind offers the speculation in passing that aliens are
here to be entertained or to blow our minds a little in African Encounters
(1982).
Larry Fawcett and Barry Greenwood in Clear Intent (1984) say the human
race could be in danger, but the laconic counterpoint that we haven’t been
conquered yet seems a call for ennui rather than concern.
In Extraterrestrials Among Us (1986), George Andrews returns to the sixties
mind-set and comes up with an extraordinary variation of the viral metaphor:
“It is an odd fact that among the viruses there are some that look like UFOs,
such as the virus T. Bacteriophage.” Some UFOs may have the ability to
operate in either the macro-dimension of outer space or the micro-dimension of
viruses, switching back and forth. He frets that our survival as a species may be
at stake. “Have we been transforming our planet into a cancer cell in the body
of the galaxy instead of making it the garden of the universe?” Terry Hansen, in
a 1981 article, offered a more appropriate somatic metaphor for the period. He
suggested UFOs may be a sort of “liver medicine” to make us function
normally as part of a cosmic organism.
Night Siege (1987) chronicles power blackouts, surges, interference, and
pain associated with an UFO flap, but offers no generalizations of their
significance.
Intruders (1987) shares the same quality of unresolved contradiction as the
prior Hopkins book. Aliens are committing a species of rape, their activities
related to an unthinkable systematic breeding experiment to enrich their stock,
reduce our differences and acquire the ability to feel human emotions. What
they do is “cruel” and each case is “a personal tragedy.” Yet he also avers: “In
none of the cases I’ve investigated have I ever encountered the suggestion of
deliberate harm or malevolence.” They don’t realize the disasters they are
causing because of an ignorance of human psychology.”
Richard Hall titled his 1988 book Uninvited Guests. It is one of the more
flaccid titles in the literature and more connotative of pushy salesmen than an
alien menace. Hall finds little evidence of overt hostility and suggests harm is
accidental or a matter of self-defense. Encounters probably represent mutual
learning experiences. There is a strong interest in us and he hopes this means
we are beginning a new phase and maturity, and perhaps a new relationship to
the universe.
Steiger, in The UFO Abductors (1988) decides there must be at least two
types of aliens. One is “genuinely concerned about our welfare and our spiritual
and physical evolution.” The other is indifferent to our needs and is sinisterly
programming people for an Armageddon, a mass invasion of Earth so imminent
it would have already taken place had not an Interplanetary Council intervened.
The Forces of Light and Darkness “are about to square off” and humankind
could find itself an unwilling pawn in this ultimate battle.
When Tujunga Canyon Contacts was reissued in 1988, Ann Druffel
modified her views in the light of new developments on the abduction scene.
Aliens were now malevolent and traumatizing, wily and harmful. The good
news was that humans have the ability to battle them off.
The eighties saw another significant development. Paul Bennewitz
introduced the story of The Dulce Base: a secret facility in the southwest that
was populated by aliens called Grays. They had a secret agreement with the
government that allowed them to abduct humans in exchange for technological
advances. Grays were devious and should never be trusted. “This particular
group can only be dealt with no differently than one must deal with a mad dog.
They have invaded our country, our air, and they are freely violating the
personal and mental integrity of our people.”
In late 1987 John Lear released a statement giving his support to the Dulce
Base story. He indicates people are killed to serve as sources for biological
materials and to protect secrets. Females are impregnated to secure crossbreed
infants. “The EBEs claim to have created Christ,” but Lear warns this is
disinformation “to disrupt traditional values for undetermined reasons.” They
have “obviously hostile intentions.” In a finale he asks:
Are the EBES, having done a hundred thousand or more abductions—
possibly millions worldwide—built an untold number of secret
underground bases getting ready to return to wherever they came from? Or
from the obvious preparations are we to assume that they are getting ready
for a big move? Or is the more probable situation that the invasion is
essentially complete and it is all over except the screaming?
Any good invasion would be done before anyone realized it had happened.
His advice: Next time you see a saucer—“Run like hell.”
UFOlogists rejected the body of claims surrounding the Dulce Base for the
most part, but they spread in the general culture, particularly by radio talk
shows and the Internet. The spread of the word Grays to label bald big-headed
aliens was one side effect of this development, but it also formed a basis for
further tales of malevolence in the nineties.
GRANDER OR GRANDEUR
Raymond Fowler’s third book on the Andreasson case, The Watchers (1990)
brings the viral metaphor back. He feels “Like a medical researcher who has
inoculated himself in order to experience and treat a disease under study.” To
his horror, he finds the UFO phenomenon linked to the future extinction of
mankind through sterility. He calls it inconceivable, but he also feels it is
authentic.
Vallée returns to the UFO scene in 1990 with Confrontations. He tallies up
twelve cases of fatal injuries attributable to UFOs, and announces the
phenomenon is more dangerous and technologically complex than we thought.
He feels “a renewed sense of urgency” about UFO study.
In a 1990 interview, Donald Ware expressed his belief that the Hybrid
Program is intended to develop bodies to house our souls in future incarnations
—a future species with a 35 percent larger brain, telepathy, and a capacity for
unconditional love. This has some resonance to a revelation passed along by
Strieber that the visitors say they recycle souls.
Terence McKenna, more a high-profile thinker than UFOlogist, notes that
UFO contact is perhaps the most common motif that is found in recreational
psilocybin experiences. They are real in some sense. They are “apocalyptic
concrescences that haunt the historical continuum, igniting religions and
various hysterias, and seeping ideas into highly tuned nervous systems.” They
“act as a kind of ideological catalyst.” UFOs will wreck science, sweep it away.
A UFO-related religion would embody an archetype of enormous power. The
UFO represents a crisis between the individual and the Over-mind. “It comes
from this murky region, beyond the end of history, beyond the end of life.... It
is both the apotheosis and the antithesis of the monkey’s journey toward mind.”
In Revelations (1991) Vallée debunks the Dulce Base stories and warns that
belief in the imminent arrival of aliens is a powerful fantasy, poisonous as any
of the great irrational upheavals of history. The 1997 Heaven’s Gate tragedy
might give this line a cache of prescience. Vallée also speculates UFO entities
“could even be fractal beings. The Earth could be their home port.” (Emphasis
in the original.) He calls upon Oscar Wilde’s dictum that an aesthetic truth was
such that it’s opposite is equally true: “Perhaps the truths about alien contact,
like those of the metaphysical kind, are the truths of masks.”
David Jacobs, in Secret Life (1992), echoes Hopkins in his belief that aliens
are neither malevolent nor benevolent and share the anthropological policy of
noninterference to save us cultural shock, or perhaps prefer secrecy to avoid
human efforts of resistance. They do not seem headed for conquest or
colonization, at least as we know the term.
George Andrews collects much of the Dulce Base or EBE mythos into his
1993 work, ExtraTerrestrial Friends and Foes. Grays are “other-dimensional
predatory parasites” and may lack souls. We “must confront the all-or-nothing
emergency situation that is now staring us in the face.” They are “paralyzing
our evolutionary development.” Insectoids are invading us to complete their
own evolution. Negative material like this is common on the Web. Lear’s talk
of future invasion is elaborated upon, for example, by Cosmic Awareness in a
1993 reading that predicted a full-force invasion by reptoids in 1999.
Linda Howe’s Glimpses of Other Realities volumes (1993, 1998) similarly
builds upon this mythos and includes portrayals of aliens as “neither
benevolent nor neutral,” with some considered a “black group” thriving on
control, destruction, and chaos. Despite a lot of negative material, Howe ends
with a curiously positive gloss: “Ultimately, there is a common bond among all
life forms ebbing and flowing on different spirals of different frequencies
supported by a singular force, an invisible matrix of energy from which
everything emerges and to which everything returns.” They are watching us,
guarding our future as a species, “and will not allow humans to destroy the
earth.” Our concept of them “has shifted from fear to curiosity to maybe even
‘one of the guys’ in cozy, human social terms.”
Timothy Good concludes A1ien Contact (1993) with his assessment that we
are being visited by several different groups of extraterrestrials. Some are less
than benign, but others are lending us a helping hand “as we reach, falteringly,
toward the stars.” Advantages will hopefully outweigh disadvantages, “leading
to a more complete and profound understanding of our place in the universal
scheme.”
In 1994, John Mack concludes in his study of the phenomenon that
“Abductions seem to be concerned primarily with two related projects:
changing human consciousness to prevent the destruction of earth’s life, and the
joining of two species for the creation of a new evolutionary form.” It might be
an educational mythic drama intended by a “transcendent intelligence to move
our being to a higher level.” It “is not evil.”
Similarly, Richard Boylan says his hopes for humanity took a “decided
upturn...with politically correct, large-minded neighbors like the ETs vowing to
step in if necessary to make sure we don’t blow up each other...” ETs will soon
land and “The open presence of ETs on earth will mean that we will have the
benefit of some of the wisest minds from some of the older and more enduring
minds in the galaxy available to help us design a civilization that really works
for all.”
Jenny Randles’ The Star Children (1995) suggests alien experiences are part
of a spiritual evolution. We are being turned into cosmic citizens, our
consciousness is being raised. “We are climbing a stairway to the stars with a
dazzling light far ahead of us at the top ... We will all get there in the end.” Our
joy may be short-lived, however, when we learn we have only reached the first
floor of very tall building. Still, there is symbolic beauty in the Hybrid Program
where people are helping “to build a new and better race.” She was clearly not
being pessimistic: “Yes, something wonderful might well be happening.”
With Watchers II (1995), Raymond Fowler suggests a connection between
near-death experiences (NDEs) and UFOs: “I am convinced that there is no
other explanation—barring alien deception —that UFOs and their entities come
from behind death’s Great Door.” They come from a world of light unimpeded
by physical laws. They care about our health. The Light Beings give a treatise
on life and death that tells us “life is wonderfully fair.” Evil will be wiped out at
some distant time, but on this plane, it must exist. They are monitoring the life-
essence of the forms dwelling on Earth as we develop in our paraphysical
evolution.
Hopkins in Witnessed (1996) thinks it evident aliens unwittingly add to the
world’s health problems. The proposition that aliens are here to teach us
environmental consciousness is firmly termed “a colossal failure.” He sees
more devoted ecologists among skeptics than abductees. All evidence points to
the Hybrid Program as their central concern. Reprising earlier conclusions,
“Despite the fears of many, nothing in my 20 years of research into this
phenomenon suggests that the UFO occupants are inherently malevolent. I have
seen absolutely no evidence that they are bent upon invasion and enslavement
of the human race.” But neither are they benign or saviors from eco-doom.
Forget demonic conquest or angelic rescue. Their goals are their own. Their
presence will in time become inescapable even to the most die-hard skeptic.
Looking at cases in Brazil, Bob Pratt remarks that while “some UFO beings
may be kind and well-intentioned ... others definitely are not ... UFOs may or
may not be significant to mankind in the long run, but until we find out, we
should treat them with the greatest of caution.”
Joe Lewels in The God Hypothesis (1997) sees UFOs as part of a
transformation of reality. The aliens may be god-like by having evolved beyond
our understanding, or were simply created at a higher level of God’s natural
hierarchy of intelligences. He knows religious fundamentalists will brand them
demonic, but fear can be averted by “the calmer voices of those who are able to
embrace the grander perspective,” accept the paradoxes, and go beyond good
and evil to realize they are but the same thing from God’s perspective. “The ET
presence can have a positive result.” We must all love unconditionally and
understand we are all one.
Colin Wilson argues in Alien Dawn (1998) that aliens have moved beyond
the stage of human evolution where we merely mark time and know how
consciousness can operate at full pressure. They are not malevolent or hostile,
but like Neanderthals, an evolutionary dead-end stuck in a spiritual cul-de-sac.
They are creating a new kind of human being and evidence exists in the form of
hundreds of super-intelligent kids. The UFO phenomenon is making an
increasing impact on the human mind by a Sheldrakean morphogenetic
induction.
In 1998, Jacobs changes his mind and announces that abductions are indeed
the threat some people had earlier thought they were. He chronicles the views
of the Positives faction of abductionology, including Leo Sprinkle, Dr. Hunter
Gray, Richard Boylan, John Mack, Joseph Nyman, and Leah Haley. Curiously,
no word of Fowler. He echoes Hopkins’ conclusion that the environmental
messages of the Positives look useless, since abductees don’t become activists.
A change is coming with hybrids and insectoid aliens assuming control of the
planet. Non-abductees are expendable and only a small breeding population
will be maintained in case the Hybrid Program has unforeseen problems. “It
may very well too late” to do anything to stop this. “I have come to the
conclusion,” Jacobs says, “that human civilization may be in for a rapid, and
perhaps disastrous change, not of our own design...” Human freedom is
doomed. “The aliens have fooled us...I do not think we will have to wait very
long.”
Michael Heseman exults that contact with a superior civilization could be
the greatest chance for humanity, opening up new perspectives. Communication
with them could give us a new perspective, a holistic view of creation and our
role in the universe. “That would be the first step in the next phase of our
evolution: the birth of ‘homo cosmicus,’ ...this alone probably makes the UFO
phenomenon the secret key to our entrance into the 21st century.”
Steiger returns fully to the Positives camp in 1999 with UFO Odyssey. The
UFO phenomenon awakens one to an awareness that “there exists one central,
unifying energy on this planet that has the potential to transform our entire
species.” Contactees maintain that the evolution of humanity successively
brings him to a more ethereal, purely spiritual state, a perfection of the soul.
UFOs are a mythological symbol, in some way more real than the Internet or
industrial averages, helping us regain our lost paradise as spiritual beings.
Mack’s Passport to the Cosmos (1999) broadens the conclusion of his earlier
book. “The abduction phenomenon seems to me to be part of a shift of
consciousness that is collapsing duality and enabling us to see that we are
connected beyond the Earth at a cosmic level.” One must posit “an ultimate or
overarching creative principle or intelligence in the cosmos that is doing its
work through this and other phenomena...” Abductees variously call this
intelligence God, Source, Home, One, “God-Goddess-All that is.” Grays and
the like are “intermediaries between us and the Divine Source.”
ASSESSMENT
Credit must be given where it is due. The Air Force got it right and told it
straight. No material threat to national security existed. The invasion never took
place. Mirarchi’s Pearl Harbor, Riordan’s knockout attack, Keyhoe’s final
operation, Wilkins’ death ceiling blockade, Michel’s Sword of Damocles,
NICAP’s danger to the fabric of society, the Lorenzens’ mass drugging and
toppling of civilization, Edwards’ imminent Overt Contact, Fawcett’s disaster
beyond imagination, Steiger’s full scale annihilation, Hynek’s Russian
Breakthrough, Clark’s swamp-lurking village-slayers, Palmer’s ongoing titanic
war, Fowler’s cultural disintegration: all were concerns with more basis in
fantasy than reality.
The sense of urgency, the sense that it may be too late, the sense that our
existence depended on a properly conducted investigation was an irrational
fear. The Air Force repeatedly tried to get across the message that UFOlogists
were wrong, but they were in no mood to listen. It is dogma among UFOlogists
that the Air Force was incompetent or worse, yet if that is accepted as a proper,
measured evaluation, what word is proper to describe the body of thought
presented by these UFOlogists? The Air Force did not perform flawlessly in the
details, but they had the big picture in more than sufficient focus to understand
it was a nuisance problem and not one of life and death significance.
The same cannot be said of UFOlogists. For them the big picture keeps
changing. In the fifties they were considerate and peace loving. In the sixties
they were a source of danger and death. In the seventies were perversely
irrational and a source of hope. In the eighties they were traumatizing though
they didn’t realize it. In the nineties they are grand things involved in our
spiritual evolution and linked with God. Are these changes a progressive march
to truth? Doubtful. The sixties were clearly worse than the fifties. The nineties’
drift into theological and metaphysical realms is worse than the seventies and
pretty overtly anti-scientific. Are these changes in fashion? Possibly, though the
word doesn’t seem right since the conclusions are at times laced with fear and
dread rather than enthusiasm.
Much of this resembles the way paranoia changes over time. The initial
presumption of alien benevolence is a puzzle I have yet to fully understand. My
sense is that aliens tended to be malevolent in science fiction. Perhaps it was a
carryover from the writings of science popularizers and astronomers. The myth
of the canal-builders of Mars implied a superior race that was also industrious
and evolved beyond war. Specifically, Lowell said “international conflicts and
wars are unknown” for the inhabitants had united against the common enemy
of a dying world. I can’t point to any more contemporary source of the idea. We
can dismiss the idea it was somehow obliged by the roundness of saucers for
the dominant theory that they were secret weapons by either us or the Russians,
possibly developed from Nazi scientists, and implicitly had a malevolent, future
war connotation.
Regardless, the interpretative drift towards malevolence is consonant with
the darkening worldview of paranoids as they withdraw from social contact and
turn inward. The hypochondriacal stage is entered as the ego collapses and the
fear of death asserts itself in a variety of forms. End-of-world fears are a
common feature of collapse and these are numerous among the early
UFOlogists. Persecution fantasies arise and this feature has led some to call this
phase the ‘pursuit’ stage of paranoia. The sixties, of course, did have such
themes in the spread of UFO chases, UFOs shadowing people, and the Men-in-
Black stories, but they constitute a subset of a much wider range of fears more
broadly recognizable as dealing with encroaching death.
To term the sixties a hypochondriacal era seems apt on several points. There
is a universal call for some authority who will tell everyone that UFOs are real.
The authorities decline. The idea appearing in both Lorenzen and Steiger that
UFOs would put sleeping drugs in reservoirs is an obvious parallel to poisoning
fantasies found in individual paranoia. The concerns over blackouts and vehicle
interference might be analogous to the loss-of-life-energy notions that develop
around the depression aspects of some cases of schizophrenia. Concerns over
war and the toppling of civilization or endangerment of the social fabric seem
familiar variants on projective world destruction fantasies. The talk of invasion
is as well, having obvious parallels in prior invasion panics like the 1789 Great
Fear rumor-panic in France, the 1913 Scareship mania, and the sizable
literature ruminating on invasion and future war that spawned War of the
Worlds.
The viral metaphors indulged in by UFO writers are a delightful expression
of the hypochondriacal style. Though some will dismiss them as a mere literary
device, it is perhaps worth mentioning that they routinely appear in other
genres of paranoia. Believers in the Jewish world conspiracy usually described
their enemies as bacilli, syphilis, the plague, and viruses. They entertained
poisoning fantasies such as the fear that mass inoculation programs were plots
to inject Gentiles with syphilis.
Hypochondria is not a permanent condition. The ego attempts to reintegrate
eventually through the building of psychological defenses against the
masochistic attacks of the conscience. Ideas of reference form to disown the
crazier aspects of one’s fears. Retrospective falsifications arise to rewrite
personal history. Conspiracy logic forms pseudo-communities to organize the
chaos of social reality. Later, delusions of grandeur arise and overcompensate
the injured ego. The final stage is cosmic identity—the individual is God, the
universe, and interlinked with everything.
As we pass from the sixties to the seventies, the calls for investigation drop
away, “urgent” slips from the language, invasion and mass drugging is replaced
by more up-beat thoughts. The bizarre aspects of alien nightmares and horrors
become more evident and efforts are made to discount them on some level—
enter control systems. Ancient astronaut lore rewrites Darwin to make us
descendants from Starfolk rather than merely apes, and rewrites the Bible to be
a product of super-science rather than superstition. In the eighties we get
Roswell, MJ-12, and some other conspiracy theories. The Dulce Base secret
agreement manages to incorporate both conspiracy and new threats of invasion
for the Internet generation. With the nineties, delusions of grandeur and cosmic
identity come to the fore among the Positives. The Dulce Base crowd and other
Regressives stir in the background to retrace the cycle.
It is human nature that people don’t often go around proclaiming their
mistakes and there is no point in feigning surprise when observing that it seems
impossible to find any UFOlogist who has reflected on the remarkable
misjudgments and the spectacle of error that took place in sixties UFOlogy. It
would have been nice to even find someone who expressed relief that the
invasion was called off. Look through the UFO histories of people like Paris
Flammonde, David Jacobs, Jerome Clark, even Curtis Peebles and Steven Dick,
and they are sanitized of any account of the wild fears that UFOlogy had about
aliens and UFOs. It is an open question if UFOlogy learns from its mistakes
given such silence, and it is one probably left unasked for the obvious answer
will be emotionally incorrect.
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Jovanovich, 1976).
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Stringfield, Leonard H. Inside Saucer Post—3-0 Blue (Moeller, 1957).
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_________________The Invisible College (E. P. Dutton, 1975).
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Wilkins, Harold T. Flying Saucers on the Attack (Ace, 1967).
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Wilson, Colin. Alien Dawn (Fromm International, 1998).
Timmerman, John P. (b. 1923). As a Lima. Ohio businessman. Timmerman

became associated with astronomer J. Allen Hynek in 1979 and provided major
funding for the operation of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) for many
years. Timmerman graduated from Cornell University in 1950, at which time
he became interested in investigating UFO sighting reports.
In 1980 Timmerman became Chairman and Treasurer of the Center and
created the traveling UFO Photo Exhibit Research Project, which began
appearing in shopping centers, universities, and at conferences throughout the
United States and Canada. In May 1980 he created the CUFOS Associate
Newsletter and served as its editor and publisher until it was discontinued in
July 1985.
When CUFOS moved from a public office located in Evanston in 1981,
Timmerman assumed much of the business operation responsibility for Dr.
Hynek and opened a public access office with paid staff in Lima. Ohio, where
he produced the International UFO Reporter edited by Dr. Hynek from January
1982 until the Lima office was combined with a new facility near Chicago,
which was opened when Dr. and Mrs. Hynek moved from Evanston, Illinois, to
Scottsdale, Arizona in 1985.
John Timmerman
In 1981, Timmerman successfully negotiated the transfer of the NICAP files

from their location in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to Chicago where they are now
combined with the case files in the offices of the J. Allen Hynek Center for
UFO Studies.
In December of 1985 Timmerman retired as Chairman of CUFOS. He
continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the J. Allen Hynek Center for
UFO Studies as Public Relations Vice President, Treasurer, and Manager of the
photo exhibit project.
P. O. Box 1621
Address: Lima, OH 45802
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: The UFO Phenomenon is still far more complex than
originally thought to be by most researchers. The proper study of the subject will
require consideration of the complex nature of human mental processes as well
as a better understanding of the physical nature of our planet and of the universe
using our best scientists and technologies. Anecdotal information will remain
our major public source for study until a way is found to share with the many
varied cultural groups in today’s world without serious social disruption the
realities now held secretly by agencies of many governments of the world
regarding the UFO Phenomenon.
—JOHN TIMMERMAN
Top Secret/Majic (Marlowe, 1996).Stanton Friedman tries to make a case that

the Majestic-12 documents are authentic and reveal a secret government cabal
controlling public knowledge about UFO crashes and the retrieval of alien
bodies. He expands upon his earlier contentions that “the wreckage of at least
two very advanced flying saucers in New Mexico in 1947” resulted in a back-
engineering program which developed the transister and other technological
breakthroughs.
transformation required to join the Galactic Society As we enter the

new millennium, the pace of human activity is increasing rapidly. This also
seems to be true for the non-human intelligence in this part of the galaxy,
whether we call them aliens, visitors, watchers, angels, or archangels. We are in
the process of joining a Galactic Society, both individually and collectively. Not
everyone will do it in this lifetime; however, I sense that 700-800 million of us
have at least started that process. Some of these people are called New Agers. In
The RA Material they are called 4th-density beings. (Elkins and Rueckert, 1982)
In Paradigm Wars: Worldviews for a New Age (1996), Dr. Mark Woodhouse
calls them the rising culture. My observation of a rapidly increasing spiritual
awareness, of environmental activism from the grass roots to the highest levels
of government, and of the prophecy in The Urantia Book suggests that these
4th-density beings will become the dominant culture in this century. The Old
Agers are on the way out. The meek will inherit the Earth.
In 1952 my world was mainly my family and friends and the woods, streets,
and schools of Arlington, Virginia. Then I saw seven UFOs and became a
truthseeker. Now my world has been transformed. We are not all at the same
level of acceptance of what is happening on this planet. Some of my ideas way
seem very strange. However, please keep a large mental hold basket to store
those ideas that don’t make sense to you. You may reject them later if you
choose. I am not tying to convince anyone of anything, but just sharing with
other truthseekers what I have come to accept as real after forty-eight years of
study.
UFOs represent, in part, the angelic force associated with the Second
Coming operation. Ascended masters are real. Pleiadians are real. Zeta
Reticulans are real. Arcturians, Aethiens, Andromies, and Essasanies are real.
And I hope you do not feel slighted if I left out your favorite aliens. There are
others out there.
Crop circles are real, and some are faked. Underground and undersea bases
are real. The 1952 MJ-12 briefing and the 1954 Special Operations Manual 1-
01 are real. The covert release of the MJ-12 manual, entitled “Extraterrestrial
Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal,” I believe, is a result of the
1993 Rockefeller White House initiative. I also believe that pressure from
members of the not-so-secret world government caused a covert release of the
alien autopsy film.
Because of the “prime directive” of the local galactic council, most of the
information associated with the film is disinformation to protect the worldviews
of those who are not ready for the alien presence. One pragmatic reason for the
prime directive is to separate the necessary fact of human/alien hybrids from
the awake consciousness of the Old Agers. I also believe that both spiritual
inspiration and alien liaison are real.
SPIRITUAL ASPECTS OF TRANSFORMATION
Intelligent life is abundant throughout the universe. God is abundant

throughout the universe. He is in you and me, in Zetas and Pleiadians, and in
angels and archangels. Everything evolves. Galaxies, planets, our physical
bodies, and spirit all evolve. God evolves. In considering human evolution I
think it is important to recognize that we have at least four bodies: our physical
body and three energy bodies. These energy bodies are the mental body, the
emotional body, and the spiritual body. As we join the Galactic Society and
gain greater access to the consciousness of “heaven,” I think we are upgrading
our physical and mental bodies. This seems to be a joint human/alien program.
The universe is so complex it is beyond our ability to fully comprehend.
However, with considerable effort and assistance from our guides, we can
greatly expand our awareness of it.
Levels of Evolution: We have been taught about levels of evolution from several
sources. I will outline two that I find useful. Seven “densities of reality” are
taught in the RA material. The 1st density includes non-living matter: water,
minerals, rock. Second in the hierarchy of evolutionary existence are plants and
animals that are not self-aware. Third are humans and cetaceans, which include
dolphins and whales. At this level, veils separate the conscious from the
unconscious mind to expedite evolutionary polarization of consciousness
through free-will. The soul’s mission through multiple incarnations is to choose
either service to others or service to self.
Souls that become sufficiently polarized are ready to graduate to the next
level, where the mission then becomes to develop unconditional love. RA said
it only takes about 50 percent positive polarization toward service to others to
graduate. This planet is being transformed into a 4th-density positive planet,
and those souls not sufficiently polarized will have an opportunity to incarnate
on another 3rd-density planet. After a soul has learned to express unconditional
love, it then becomes ready for the 5th-density experience of developing true
wisdom. Many 5th-density souls may combine to become a galactic teacher, a
6th-density being that some call an archangel. RA, a galactic teacher, who was
once worshipped here as the Egyptian Sun God, said he went through his 3rd-
density experience on the planet Venus, 2.6 billion years ago. He said that half
way through the 6th density those of positive and negative polarization become
one, and graduate to the 7th density as part of God’s plan.
My second description of the levels of evolution comes from Deepak
Chopra’s July 20, 1996, lecture at the Institute of Noetic Science’s (IONS)
conference in Boca Raton, Florida. He described the “shades of awareness”
detailed in ancient Vedic teachings. He described the first shade of awareness
as deep sleep, and the second as a dream state. The third is the awake state that
I hope most people reading this are experiencing. He said if you “woke up”
from this state you would think it is not real. Chopra describes the 4th as
transcendental awareness. One characteristic is that you acquire non-local
awareness. It seems to me that the rising culture on this planet is acquiring non-
local awareness through telepathy, through remote viewing, and through out-of-
body experiences. At this level, Chopra said, “You can get a glimpse of the
soul.” The 5th shade he describes as cosmic awareness, where one can have
simultaneous local and nonlocal awareness. (I think Pleiadians can do that.)
The 6th level he describes as divine or God awareness. Here a being can
cognate, or cause to be born, objects in both local and non-local awareness.
(Perhaps Sai Baba is one of these.) At this level, intentionality assumes
awesome power. The 7th level is described as Unity. He says, “The spirit within
merges with the spirit without, and the universe is experienced as one’s body.”
These seven “shades of awareness” seem to be parallel descriptions of the
seven “densities” or levels in the evolution of the soul as described by RA in
1982.
Assistance from a Galactic Council: We have been told through various
sources that Ashtar has been given responsibility by a local galactic council to
coordinate the activities of the various beings helping us with our
transformation. Ashtar says that Sananda or Jesus, is his spiritual adviser. This is
primarily a transformation of consciousness, so Jesus is directing that process.
Perhaps he decides when we are ready for more Marian apparitions or more
phantom hitchhikers.
Marian apparitions, sometimes associated with UFOs, are increasing around
the world, and I have found that the phantom hitchhiker phenomenon is also
widespread. Evidence indicates that on November 22, 1993, eight different cars
traveling on I-IO east of Tallahassee, Florida encountered a phantom hitchhiker.
Most drivers felt compelled to stop and pick up a strange looking man along a
lonely stretch of the highway. He looked a lot like Jesus, and once in the car he
said, “Gabriel is about to blow his horn.” Then he just vanished. On one
occasion two children were in the back seat, and the man just appeared in the
front seat next to their mother. The children were quite disturbed, and the man
said, “It’s time for Gabriel to blow his horn.” He then vanished. Seven such
events happened that day just west of a speed trap, and each driver sped up and
was stopped. Each of the seven related their story to the state trooper, and the
eighth felt compelled to report the event by phone. Within a three-day period I
received reports of these events from three independent sources in Niceville,
Panama City, and Yalaha, Florida. I wonder if they were each inspired to tell
me so that these events would become public knowledge.
I mentioned these events at a couple of UFO conferences and learned that a
series of similar events took place on the Washington, D.C. belt way, near Los
Angeles, and in Illinois. Foreign investigators said the phantom hitchhiker gave
the same message in Great Britain, Germany, and Italy. Gabriel blowing his
horn is mentioned in the Bible in relation to the end times. I think someone is
trying to tell us something, and if it is not Jesus, I think it must be one of his
angels.
In July 1996 the late Willis Harmon, then president of IONS, was speaking
on the Pathfinder Project. This project is defining the path from here to there,
where there is a sustainable society, a new world order, or heaven on Earth. A
question from the audience was, “How can we get from here to there when
there are so many selfish people on Earth?” After Harmon, my answer was,
“We can’t do it without celestial assistance.” I think we are getting that
assistance. We are being guided. But, beyond that, I think that whoever decides
which souls reincarnate here will send the highly selfish souls somewhere else.
Perhaps only those souls oriented primarily toward service to others will
reincarnate here, and their mission will be to develop unconditional love of
others. Encouraging evidence of this celestial intervention can be found in the
recent book, The Millennium Children (1997) by Caryl Dennis.
PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF TRANSFORMATION
Three of the physical aspects of our transforming to a 4th-density society are

an increasing number of photos and videos of alien vehicles, advanced
technology that is kept away from 3rd-density society until all national leaders
choose peace, and a human/Zeta hybridization program. Some people might
add to this list the crop circles and amazing pictograms that have increased in
magnitude and meaning in recent years.
Photographs: Because photographs can be faked, photographic evidence of the

alien presence is usually a non-threatening way to raise the awareness of those
who are ready, without destroying the worldview of those who are not. Albums
of good UFO photos fill several shelves in the archives of Wendelle Stevens in
Tucson, Arizona. When Jaime Maussan, a top TV journalist and UFO researcher
in Mexico, requested that people send him UFO videos, he received over 5000
of them. Some showed groups of up to 50 objects. As the transformation
progresses our alien visitors become bolder in their careful indoctrination
program. They have now made an appearance at each of the last eight
independence day celebrations in Mexico.
Carlos Dias and his lovely wife Margarita are an intelligent and spiritually-
oriented young couple who have willingly cooperated with Pleiadians. Carlos
was contacted in 1979 by human-like beings, and he received guidance for
many years before being allowed to take close photos and videos of Pleiadian
vehicles. One video shows him in a field inviting contact as the vehicle pops
into view above him, wakes the roosters and dogs, and then pops out. After one
missing-time experience in the mountains a man got out of his car and said, “If
you want to know what you went through today, I will wait for you tomorrow
at noon...” at a certain location in Mexico City. When they met, the man was
teaching school children to respect all living things. The man told Carlos we
humans should open our minds and hearts. Carlos was offered further education
about the transformation while in his community and while on their vehicles.
Another interesting set of pictures are the Almintaka photos taken on
September 27, 1989, in Tennessee. The object appeared to be twice the size of
the full Moon and was photographed with the best film Kodak makes, using a
2000 mm lens with special filters. Graham E. Bethune of Toms River, New
Jersey, a retired Navy fighter pilot, is the chief investigator and a long-time
friend of the anonymous photographer. The man was apparently inspired to put
the camera and film in the trunk of his car, and when driving near Nashville the
object flew over. He stopped, and his wife said he appeared to be in a trance as
he got the camera and took a whole roll of film. The photos show the object
demonstrating a great variety of lighting effects, including a blue beam coming
from a protrusion. Some type of smoke or water vapor condensation was used
to delineate some of the light beams.
Photo opportunities of strange vehicles in Gulf Breeze, Florida have been
newsworthy for more than a decade. Phase one started on November 11, 1987,
and included forty-one excellent photos of three types of vehicles taken by Ed
and Frances Walters during eighteen sessions over five and a half months.
These were well documented in their first book The Gulf Breeze Sightings
(1990). I have seen seventy-five photos of the vertical-sided vehicles taken by
various people in that area. Ed and Frances later published UFO Abductions in
Gulf Breeze (1994) to relate information about six abductions and other strange
events that we investigators advised they leave out of the first book. Phase two
of the Gulf Breeze sightings included an eighteen-month period when
anomalous objects, usually over a mile away, were recorded by the Gulf Breeze
Research Team 175 times. During this period they were documented by every
news reporter and seen by most of the visitors that came from around the
world. Phase three involved continuing daylight photo and video opportunities
by Ed Walters. Three additional types of vehicles and a number of Ed’s
interesting encounters are now documented in UFOs Are Real! Here is the
Proof (1997), co-authored with Dr. Bruce Maccabee.
One of these vehicles was photographed as an F-15 made a close
identification pass. It was 29 feet in diameter and 19 feet high. It had similar
domes top and bottom and was rimmed by eight egg-shaped protrusions. A
later photo of this type of vehicle was made as a column of water raised up
from the sound to contact the vehicle. A hamburger-shaped object was
photographed three times. The last time, after it came closer, Ed said he just
pointed the camera and something else clicked the shutter. He said that during
this event a strange thumping noise was coming from the window, and an
anomalous black dot appears there in the picture.
Ed even wrote about his opportunity to video his own abduction, but after he
viewed it on TV it was apparently erased by some alien technology as he
watched. A third type of object is an apparently unmanned disk 8 feet in
diameter that hovered over the beach behind Ed’s house in November 1995.
Unfortunately this photo was inadvertently left out of the book by the editor. In
November 1996 he took a closer photo of this type of object after it appeared
25 feet away in his back yard, about 3 feet above the ground. The shadow is
plainly evident in both photos.
My conclusion after studying the Gulf Breeze UFOs for nearly ten years is
that the vertical-sided, Type-I vehicles come in two sizes: one about 12 feet in
diameter that is too small to take on humans, and one about twice that diameter
that is designed to carry humans. These have the capability to energize the
surrounding air so that it produces orange photons. I think they do this because
the orange-ball UFOs are less frightening than structured vehicles.
In the summer of 1994 Bland Pugh photographed, from Ed Walter’s front
yard, an unseen disk immediately above a frequently-seen red light during a
Moon-lit night. He used Ectar 1000 film. This disk had the same shape as the 8-
foot-diameter disk Ed photographed in November 1995 and November 1996. If
it is the same, the red light was 2 feet in diameter. Investigators of other red-
light UFOs in Gulf Breeze determined that the lights were about 2 feet in
diameter by using triangulation. I think some of the many red-light type UFOs
are produced by unmanned vehicles, while others may be the reddish veil of
plasma that hangs below Gulf Breeze Type-II vehicles shown in The Gulf
Breeze Sightings. I have seen evidence to suggest that these Type-II vehicles
belong to Ashtar’s observers.
4th-Density Technology Programs: For several decades UFO investigators have

heard stories about secret underground bases and humans and aliens working
together. One story has President Eisenhower getting demonstrations of alien
technology in April 1954 and asking them to please minimize their effect on our
society. William F. Hamilton III has written several books about underground
bases, and Dr. Richard Sauder speaks about the machines, mostly built by
companies associated with Hughes Tool and Dye, Inc., used to construct the
bases and connecting tunnels. Magnetic levitation vehicles are postulated for
rapid underground transport, and strange air vents, many on AT&T facilities,
suggest the base and tunnel system is widespread. Tunnel evacuation is probably
necessary for the high speeds reported to investigators.
Bill Uhouse claims to have worked for twenty-five years in two
underground facilities, one near Area 51 and one near Dulce, New Mexico, that
he was told are no longer under U.S. jurisdiction. World territories perhaps?
Uhouse was told there were six such bases in, or beneath, the United States. He
was working on a flying saucer simulator in the 1970s. Uhouse said their team
had an alien consultant. On the 1988 NBC special, “UFO Coverup Live,” a
shadowy figure called “Falcon” showed diagrams of alien physiology and said
aliens have operational control of parts of Nevada. Amazing devices, some
perhaps made by Lockheed-Martin, are test flown in Nevada at night and
photographed by many people. Bob Lazar claims to have worked on a vehicle
designed for small aliens.
One young technician told me he has seen evidence that transporter
technology, a la Star Trek, is used to move people from Area 51 to Pine Gap,
Australia. I wonder how much of this is U.S. technology and how much is
world technology being kept out of the 3rd-density society by a world-level
organization operating under a galactic prime directive.
Retired Army intelligence officer, Philip J. Corso, recently wrote The Day
After Roswell (1997) with William J. Birnes. They indicate that secrets from
confiscated UFOs led to laser technology, fiber optics, night-vision capability,
and the microchip.
Others have provided interesting evidence suggesting an electrogravitic
propulsion system for the B-2. In 1996 Al Gore, a dual-hatted member of
government, announced the contract award to Lockheed-Martin for the next
generation space shuttle. This is a delta-shaped single-stage vehicle with “linear
aerospike engines” that carries a large payload into space and lands like a
plane. These engines burn hydrogen and oxygen through a linear aerospike
nozzle. When I got my Mechanical Engineering degree I was taught there was
not enough energy in that chemical reaction, even with zero waste, to
accomplish that mission without reducing the effects of gravity. Perhaps
electrogravitic propulsion, Star Trek-type transporters, and most zero-point
energy devices are being reserved for use by 4th-density society until all
national leaders choose peace.
Members of world government, which include many dual-hatted members
of national governments, are working hard to cause all national leaders to
choose peace. Meanwhile, some new technology is being released for limited
use. I have been told that the Patterson Power Cell is a cold-fusion heat source
that can now be leased for $5000 per year. It is not likely to be used for war.
Electrogravitic propulsion systems seem to be used only where they can remain
highly controlled by unselfish people. And I wonder if the reason nations don’t
spend more money on the ability to go to Mars is because some humans already
have the ability to go, either on their own vehicles or perhaps on vehicles of
their alien friends.
Human-alien hybridization: Budd Hopkins introduced many of us to evidence

of human-alien hybridization through the experiences of “Kathy Davis” and
others in the 1987 book, Intruders. While she raised two of her children, she
apparently carried two for over three months that were raised by aliens, and she
was told there were seven more developed from her eggs. Kathy later met on
alien vehicles the two she had carried for three months. She thought they were
beautiful, but she agrees that because of their larger heads and eyes most of us
would not accept them in 3rd-density society. During at least four of Ed Walters’
eight abductions, he apparently provided emotional training for a total of thirty-
five hybrid children two feet tall.
My friend “Pam” is raising two children born of Immaculate Conception.
Both have been able to see people’s auras since birth, and they recall many on-
board experiences with aliens and many backyard experiences with hybrids, all
without fear. One even said she could see through the ceiling while waking up,
like superwoman. Her mother was standing over her bed watching her
expressions change as this happened. In 1996 Pam said she often felt a presence
nearby. Later, when she was taken on board by aliens and presented a baby to
hold, she felt the same presence. I wonder if the spirit of this child was not
checking out mom while the new body was growing in an artificial womb.
I think we, as a species, are being genetically enhanced. The result may be
called Homo noeticus: humans with increased consciousness or ways of
knowing. At the 1993 Human Potential Foundation Conference in Washington,
D.C., “When Cosmic Cultures Meet,” a recently retired legal counsel to the
National Research Council and legal consultant to NASA called the next
species Homo alterios spatialis in his talk on “Extraterrestrial Progeny of
Humankind and a Declaration of Interdependence.”
George S. Robinson’s paper in The Proceedings was given the lead position,
but the title was changed to “Homo Alterios Spatialis: A Transgenic Odyssey.”
My interpretation of one of his sentences is truly profound. He said, “In short,
Earth-kind may well be the common progenitor when cosmic cultures meet.”
Perhaps more of us will soon meet our space-kind sons and daughters, brothers
and sisters, and perhaps some missing twins.
Three of the 1996 movies I saw were Phenomenon, Powder, and
Independence Day. The first two seemed to address the public reaction to
people who are different, as does the TV series Alien Nation. They show that
many people in our society are not yet ready to accept 4th-density capabilities. I
think we all need to give serious thought to these messages, because it is
happening among us. Independence Day seemed to be designed primarily to
attract a big audience, but one underlying message was that to survive we must
give more thought to being a citizen of the world rather than of a nation.
We are being given greater awareness, greater knowledge of all, that is,
greater knowledge of God. We are being given greater telepathic ability to the
point that I think it will become a normal means of communication as we join
the Galactic Society.
POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION
If God wanted to get something done, like transform Earth to a 4th-density

planet, how would he do it? He does it through individual human beings:
through Zetas and Pleiadians, and through our guides—angels and archangels.
God also works through those who have the resources to bring about world
change. The primary resources are money and influence. Many of these people
are part of the not-so-secret world government.
God’s helpers from various levels of “reality” have assisted and influenced
human evolution since its beginnings. (Newbrough, 1882) They influenced the
ancient mystery religions of Babylon, Egypt, India, Persia, and Greece with
various forms of pantheism. These wise spirits from “above” have throughout
many centuries influenced our thought and action through Kabbalism,
Gnosticism, the Knights Templars, the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry/Illuminati,
and more recent spiritually-oriented groups like the Theosophical Society, all
culminating in what many call the New Age movement.
The rate of interaction may have increased since World War II to keep our
technological development from getting too far ahead of our spiritual
development. I have seen various signs that one primary purpose of
Freemasonry is to build a widespread mindset that will make a world
government possible. A democratically-elected world government seems to be
a prerequisite to the people of Earth joining the Galactic Society.
The not-so-secret world government: Though not an expert on world

government, I have focused my attention on it since January 1994. We have been
living with a world government for seventy-nine years. I found an important
book that seems to have greatly influenced the not-so-secret world government
in 1972: The Limits of Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the
Predicament of Mankind. (Meadows, et al., 1972)
I view the Club of Rome (COR) as a think-tank for the not-so-secret world
government, much like the expertise of the Rand Corporation is used to provide
guidance for the U.S. Air Force on complicated issues. The COR used the
world’s best system modelers and the big computer at MIT to model growth in
the world system from 1900 to 2100. All relevant data collected from 1900 to
1970 was used, and the computer was asked what happens if we keep doing
what we have been doing? Parameters plotted included birth and death rates,
natural resources, capitol, population, food per capita, industrial output per
capita, and pollution. The curves showed many peaks in the first half of the
next century, and by 2050 the death rate was nearly vertical. Population growth
is finally halted by death due to decreased food and medical services. If many
stabilizing policies were implemented in 1975, including an average of two
children per family, the charts were less scary, and a stabilized society was
nearly reached by 2050. However, if these policies were delayed until the year
2000, the decline continued through the end of this century without
stabilization.
There is a 13-page commentary at the end of The Limits of Growth by The
Executive Committee of the Club of Rome: Alexander King, Saburo Okita,
Aureilo Peccei, Eduard Pestel, Hugo Thiemann, and Carroll Wilson. The
commentary is concluded with the following paragraphs:
“The concept of a society in a steady state of economic and ecological

equilibrium may appear easy to grasp, although the reality is so distant from
our experience as to require a Copernican revolution of the mind. Translating
the idea into deed, though, is a task filled with overwhelming difficulties and
complexities. We can talk seriously about where to start only when the message
of The Limits of Growth, and its sense of extreme urgency, are accepted by a
large body of scientific, political, and popular opinion in many countries. The
transition in any case is likely to be painful, and it will make extreme demands
on human ingenuity and determination. As we have mentioned, only the
conviction that there is no other avenue to survival can liberate the moral,
intellectual, and creative forces required to initiate this unprecedented human
undertaking.
“But we wish to underscore the challenge rather than the difficulty of
mapping out the road to a stable state society. We believe that an unexpectedly
large number of men and women of all ages and conditions will readily respond
to the challenge and will be eager to discuss not if but how we can create this
new future.
“The Club of Rome plans to support such activity in many ways. The
substantive research begun at MIT on world dynamics will be continued both at
MIT and through studies conducted in Europe, Latin America, the Soviet
Union, and Japan. And, since intellectual enlightenment is without effect if it is
not also political, The Club of Rome also will encourage the creation of a world
forum where statesmen, policy-makers, and scientists can discuss the dangers
and hopes for the future global system without the constraints of formal
intergovernmental negotiation.
“The last thought we wish to offer is that man must explore himself—his
goals and values—as much as the world he seeks to change. The dedication to
both tasks must be unending. The crux of the matter is not only whether the
human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without
failing into a worthless state of existence.”
These words must have had a profound effect on the three branches of the
world government: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of
International Affairs, and the Institute of Pacific Relations founded in 1921. I
suspect that The Limits of Growth influenced the formation of a unifying
organization, the Trilateral Commission, in 1973.
CONCLUSIONS
There is much evidence that aliens and angels are working with humans to
transform this planet. In 1959 Pope John XXIII, political head of the Roman
Catholic Church, wrote in his diary that he had visits by both Jesus and Mary.
Now there are Marian apparitions, often associated with UFOs, in many parts
of the, world. During one of these Giorgio Bongiovanni was stigmatized, and
he was told to tell the world about the transformation. I was told by a retired
CIA agent that in 1985 Gorbachev had a visit by two Ascended Masters. That
visit is still changing the world.
I have recently heard evidence that suggests the public is being deceived
about the A-10 that mysteriously went to Colorado on April 2, 1997. It was
apparently briefly captured by aliens as a way to get the attention of authorities.
Captain Buttons is reported to have been removed from the plane to openly join
the Galactic Society. U.S. proliferation of sophisticated weapons of war may
have been an issue there. Perhaps the people in our Space Command
headquarters know. Human-alien liaison is real, and I think many of us are now
ready to know what’s going on. Greater knowledge of joint human-alien efforts
to transform this planet should not cause too much stress for those who don’t
care much about the broader issues facing humanity, but it can give much-
needed hope to the unknowing participants.
—DONALD M. WARE
References
Elkins, Don, and Carla Rueckert. The RA Material (L/L Research, 1982).
Dennis, Caryl, with Parker Whitman. The Millennium Children (Rainbows Unlimited, 1997).
“The Fellowship.” The Urantia Book: A Revelation for Humanity (Uversa Press, 1996).
Human Potential Foundation. When Cosmic Cultures Meet, The Proceedings (1997).
Meadows, Donella and Dennis, et al. The Limis to Growth (Signet/NAL, 1972).
Newbrough, John Ballou. Ohaspe: A New Bible (Kosmon Press, 1944).
Walters, Ed. The Gulf Breeze Sightings (Avon, 1990). Walters, Ed and Frances. UFO Abductions in Gulf
Breeze (Avon, 1994).
Walters, Ed and Bruce Maccabee. UFOs are Real! Here is the Proof (1997).
Woodhouse, Mark B. Paradigm Wars: Guidelines for a New Age (1996).
Tremonton (Utah) movie On July 2, 1952, Navy Warrant Officer Delbert C.

Newhouse was driving toward a new duty station with his wife and two
children. Just after eleven in the morning, his wife noticed a group of bright
objects that she couldn’t easily identify. Newhouse, a trained Navy
photographer, stopped the car to retrieve his 16 mm camera from the trunk.
By the time he got his camera out, the objects had moved away from the car.
Newhouse said later that when one object broke from the formation, he tracked
it so that analysts would have something to work with. He let it fly across the
field of view. He did that two or three times. When he turned back, the whole
formation was gone.
The details of the story vary, depending on the source. Air Force files, based
on the information supplied by others, show that Newhouse and his wife saw
the objects at close range. By the time he got the car stopped and the camera
out of the trunk, the objects had moved to a longer range. In an interview
conducted by UFO investigators in 1976, Newhouse confirmed he had seen the
objects at close range. He said they were large, disk-shaped, and brightly
lighted. Major Dewey Fournet, once a member of the Pentagon’s UFO office,
said Newhouse had said the same thing to him.
After filming the objects, Newhouse stored his camera, got back into the car
and drove on to his new duty station. Once there, he had the film processed and
sent a copy to the Air Force suggesting they might find it interesting.
The Air Force investigation lasted for months, including analysis of the film.
They tried everything to identify the objects but failed. When coupled to the
report and the reliability of the photographer, the Air Force was stuck. They
had no explanation When the Air Force finished, the Navy asked for it. They
made a frame-by-frame analysis that took more than a thousand man-hours.
They studied the motion of the objects, their relation to one another in the
formation, the lighting of the objects, and every other piece of data they could
find on the film. In the end, like their Air Force counterparts, they were left
with no explanation.
But, unlike their Air Force counterparts, the Navy experts were not restricted
in their praise of the film. Their report said that the objects were internally
lighted spheres that were not reflecting sunlight. They also estimated the speed
at 3,780 miles per hour, if the spheres were five miles away. At twice the
distance, they would have been moving twice as fast. At half the distance, half
the speed. If the objects were just under a mile distant, they were traveling at
472 miles an hour.
When the Robertson Panel reviewed the film, Dr. Luis Alverez, a physicist
and winner of the Nobel prize, said that they might be birds (specifically,
seagulls which are known to be in the area). Fournet said, “Dr. Alverez
suggested that as a possible solution to that Tremonton movie.”
Computer enhancement of the Tremonton, Utah, UFOs
In the years that followed, the Tremonton movie’s suggested explanation

became a solid explanation. Donald H. Menzel and L.G. Boyd, in their book,
The World of Flying Saucers, wrote of the Tremonton film: “The pictures are of
such poor quality and show so little that even the most enthusiastic home-
movie fan today would hesitate to show them to his friends. Only a stimulated
imagination could suggest that the moving objects are anything but very badly
photographed birds.” (Menzel and Boyd, 1963)
The Condon Committee investigator on the case, Dr. William K. Hartmann,
reexamined the film. After reviewing the evidence, Hartmann concluded:
“These observations give strong evidence that the Tremonton films do show
birds, as hypothesized above, and I now regard the objects as so identified.”
(Gillmor, 1969)
So a possible answer, suggested by the Robertson Panel became the final
explanation for the Newhouse film. However, in the analysis that appeared after
the Robertson Panel, one fact was left out. Newhouse saw the objects at close
range. Fournet said, “...when you look at what Newhouse said when he was
interviewed after that...when you put all that together, the seagull hypothesis
becomes flimsier and flimsier.” As with most others, this case stands or falls
with the credibility of the witnesses.
—KEVIN D. RANDLE
References
Gillmor, Daniel S. and Condon, Edward U., eds. Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (E. P.
Dutton/Bantam Books, 1969).
Menzel, Donald and Boyd, Lyle G. The World of Flying Saucers (Doubleday, 1963).
Randle, Kevin D. “Tremonton (Utah) movie” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs
(Double-day/New English Library, 1980).
_________________. Conspiracy of Silence (Avon Books, 1997).
_________________. Scientific UFOlogy (Avon Books, 1999). Ruppelt, Edward J. The Report on
Unidentified Flying Objects (Doubleday, 1956).
Truth About Flying Saucers, The (S.G. Phillips, 1956). French

mathematician Aimé Michel examines the observed characteristics of UFOs and
various theories about their propulsion systems. He searches for patterns in UFO
sightings and finds a tendency in European records for reports to be clustered
during periods when Mars is aligned to the Sun and in areas where military bases
were located.
Truth About The UFO Crash At Roswell, The (Avon Books, 1994). Kevin
Randle and Donald Schmitt claim to have three hundred witnesses attesting to a
military recovery of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and alien bodies near Roswell
in 1947. This book was written, they say, to “correct errors” and add data
collected since the 1991 publication of their first book on the subject, UFO
Crash at Roswell. Several chapters of this book debunk the credibility of MJ-12
documents dealing with Roswell and challenge the veracity of Stanton
Friedman’s principal source for his book claiming a second spacecraft also
crashed to the west of Roswell.
Tujunga Canyon Contacts, The (Prentice-Hall, 1980). Ann Druffel and D.

Scott Rogo investigate in this book a contagion of alien abductions which
spread over a period of decades between five Los Angeles women who were
involved with each other as friends and lovers. The authors speculate that since
all of the women were interested in metaphysical subjects, or displayed psychic
talents, and all were lesbians, the “UFO entities” may have been intrigued
about their reproductive habits and the effect on human evolution.
Tujunga Canyon contacts In 1975, a group of five young women came to
the attention of the NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena) investigative subcommittee in Los Angeles. All had lived or were
still living in the area of the Tujunga Canyons, which wind up into the San
Gabriel Mountains in Southern California. The first case documented was that
of Sara Shaw and Jan Whitley, who had been awakened one night in 1953 by a
bright light outside their isolated cabin. An unexplained two-hour lapse of time
occurred, after which the two young women fled down the mountain. The
episode remained a mystery for twenty years, but when “missing time”
experiences began to receive publicity, Sara Shaw sought our advice. After
months of investigation, the two witnesses were hypnotically regressed
separately by a clinical hypnotist, Bill McCall, M.D.
Sara recalled several thin humanoids in black garments coming through the
closed window of their bedroom. They transported the two women onto a
Saturn-shaped UFO hovering over a nearby stream. Jan was taken away,
protesting violently, but Sara cooperated with the creatures as they examined
her with an X-ray type device. Afterwards, they held a “conference” with her,
telling her about a “cancer cure.” Afterwards, the two women were ushered
from the “craft” down a beam of light.
Later, Jan was repeatedly harassed by invisible “presences” in houses where
she lived alone. The presences invariably urged her to “come with them” but
Jan struggled mentally each time with them until they vanished.
At the last encounter they became visible as disembodied heads surrounding
her bed. She resisted verbally, insisting they leave her alone. They never
returned.
Unlike Sara, Jan was unable to recover visual memories of her 1953
encounter, but under hypnosis she experienced a certainty that the creatures
were essentially invisible to her. She recalled being terrorized, a “crunching
pain” in her head and a feeling that “the atmospheric pressure had changed.”
Although she was convinced that the intruders were essentially invisible to her,
she conceded other witnesses might see them in a visible form.
A separate encounter involved Jan and a third Tujunga witness, Emily
Cronin. (All five witnesses preferred to be given pseudonyms to protect their
identity.) In 1956, the two young women were driving home late at night along
a mountain road but pulled over because of heavy truck traffic. Sleeping in a
wayside rest stop, they were suddenly awakened by a bright light. Both felt
completely paralyzed. For a few minutes Emily struggled against the paralysis
and eventually was able to move one finger, breaking her entire paralysis. Jan
also abruptly came out of her paralyzed state. She had been unable to resist by
herself, but apparently Emily broke the paralyzed state for both. The two sped
down the mountain, not speaking a word until they came to a cafe where they
shared their impressions of what had happened. They remembered terror,
paralysis, and the unexplained light but could not recover more details. When
regressed by Dr. McCall, Emily remembered two entities clad in black
emerging from a brightly-lit landed “craft” nearby. The creatures circled their
car, apparently curious about Emily’s small son who was sleeping on the back
seat. The entities were tall with elongated, thin heads. She had the impression
that the creatures had “made a mistake” because a third entity in the craft was
urging the others to return to the “UFO.” The “craft” departed about the time
Emily broke though her paralysis.
Later, Emily repeatedly perceived whitish entities which urged her to come
with them but succeeded in breaking the altered state each time with a mental
struggle. Subsequently, her roommate, Toni Fox, was able to help her by
becoming aware she was “struggling” and gently waking her. Toni never saw
the entities or experienced any paralysis.
In 1975, two other young women contacted Emily late one night in 1975,
frightened and puzzled. Lori Briggs and Jo Maine, living in a nearby town, had
experienced a terrorizing event involving paralysis and vague perception of
small white-skinned entities. They were as rational and honest as the other
three women and were eventually hypnotically regressed. Lori remembered
being abducted by several thin, small creatures into a room with strange
machines. She was examined by an X-ray type of equipment.
When the creatures suggested she come with them to an unexplained
destination, Lori used a metaphysical technique, “internal sound,” which she
instinctively employed for meditation, protection and relaxation. The creatures
seemed surprised at her resistance and quickly transported her back to her own
apartment, Jo at her side. Jo retrieved memories only of lying on a platform and
of seeing “lights” and a dim “dome-shape.” Throughout the ensuing years, after
she moved to Tujunga, Lori at times became aware that the creatures were
trying to re-contact her. She would hear a loud, piercing noise the creatures
made during the first encounter. When she promptly used her “own sound”
against theirs, the entities left each time.
Seven separate types of events were experienced by the five Tujunga
women, three of which had two witnesses. In 1980 these events became the
subject of a book by this author and parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo. This was
The Tujunga Canyon Contacts published by Prentice-Hall in 1980 with an
updated paperback in 1989.
The book was the first to describe multiple-witness abductions and the
possibility of “defense techniques” to fend off abduction scenarios, leading to
this author’s subsequent research presented in the 1998 publication of How to
Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction.
Since the Tujunga witnesses were of differing ages and were not in close
contact during the 22-year period of the abduction events, it was hypothesized
that Jan, who shared three of the experiences, might be somehow a “source of
contagion” which made the other witnesses subject to abduction experiences.
This “source of contagion” hypothesis was later interpreted by other
researchers as being generational in nature, since many abductees have
grandparents, parents, and children who have abduction experiences.
Scott Rogo and I wrote separate chapters on their interpretations of the
events. Rogo hypothesized that the UFO phenomenon is essentially quasi-
physical and is the product of a “supermind” that controls human consciousness
and produces temporary energy forms that mold themselves into various shapes
based on the predispositions of the viewer—in essence, a type of “mental
projection.”
I hypothesized that, while ordinary UFO phenomena seem physical and
possibly extraterrestrial, so-called alien abductors are an order of creation
which share the Earth with us in a hidden form and are essentially posing as
UFO occupants in order to frighten and overcome human beings. Orders of
intelligent creation, such as the Al-Jinn described in the Muslim Koran, Sidhe
or Faery-folk described in academic writings by W. B. Yeats and others, and
Incubi researched by prominent theologians such as Lodovico Sinistrari of
Italy, have many characteristics in common with our modern-day alien UFO
abductor: (1) materializing and de-materializing; (2) shape-shifting in size and
form; (3) passing through solid matter; (4) sexually harassing nature; and (5)
deceptive, or traumatizing by nature.
The California town of Tujunga and its treasured, wild canyons has long
been regarded as a “window area” for strange events, both paranormal and
UFOlogical.
—ANN DRUFFEL
12th Planet, The (Stein & Day, 1976). Zecharia Sitchin translates Sumerian,
Babylonian and Assyrian texts, along with the original Hebrew version of the
Old Testament, to piece together a theory that visitors from an undiscovered
12th planet in our solar system inspired creation of the Sumerian civilization
and Biblical stories of miracles and divine intervention. These visitors, called
the Nefilim, came to Earth in search of minerals, mostly gold, and used genetic
engineering to create humankind from Homo erectus. Some of the Nefilim
opposed this experiment and caused the great flood to purify the planet of their
creation.
2001: A Space Odyssey (Produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick for

MGM, 1968). This Academy Award-winning motion picture pushed the
boundaries of the popular imagination to new limits.
The movie was based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke entitled “The
Sentinel,’ which first appeared in 1950. In it, an extraterrestrial artifact was
discovered on the moon by Earth astronauts. What made the discovery such a
powerful case of “future shock” was not just its otherworldly origin, but its age:
four million years. This meant that long before human development was under
way, other beings of a very high order of intelligence had been winging their
way across the cosmos. The rest of the story concerns the odyssey of the
spacecraft Discovery, as its lone surviving astronaut encounters an unknown
intelligence that turns out to be our lord and savior.
Although not a religious film per se, it was in effect a space-age Genesis—a
creation story featuring mankind as the product of a cosmic experiment being
carried out, not by the traditional Judeo-Christian God, but by extraterrestrial
intelligences who, because of attributes acquired during their own long
evolution, might themselves be defined as gods.
In other words, 2001 contained the essential elements of the ancient
astronaut theory prior to the fame of Erich von Däniken.
Moreover, the artifact in the story was more than a stone monument,
indicating the possible the existence of otherworldly visitors. The black
monolith was both an alarm and a teaching device, which had been deliberately
buried on the moon four million years before. Once excavated and exposed to
light, it would serve as a signal to the beings who put it there. Thus, the
“sentinel” would beam the message that man had reached a new step in his
evolution—the capability of leaving the Earth and venturing into the cosmos.
In the novel version of 2001, Arthur Clarke tells of the monolith’s crystalline
counterpart, used as a teaching machine for the man-apes back on Earth. It was
in effect a highly complicated computer that thoroughly probed and mapped the
brains and bodies of the early hominids, studied their reactions, evaluated their
potential, and gave them “human” intelligence. Kubrick told Playboy magazine
in 1968: “I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001—but not any
traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s
monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing
scientific definition of God.” And so he did.
But Clarke and Kubrick gave their “gods” a much higher level of technology
than von Däniken gave his. First of all, they were not of human form. Indeed,
having freed themselves from matter, they existed as pure energy. Even the
Earth people of 2001 that evolved from ape-men were far more advanced than
von Däniken’s ancient astronauts. They had talking and thinking computers, an
enormous space station, full-scale colonization of the moon, and artificially
induced hibernation for long space journeys. No evidence of this kind of
technology has ever been found as testimony to the presence of ancient
astronauts. If and when it is, we will then have the kind of indications that can
be taken seriously.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey (New American Library, 1968).
Interview with Stanley Kubrick in Playboy magazine (September 1968).
U
UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Prometheus Books, 1988). Philip

Klass writes that movies and books have inspired an epidemic of alien
abduction hoaxes, delusions and fantasies. The use of hypnotic regression to
extract memories of alien abduction is dangerous and deceptive because
hypnotized subjects can willfully and convincingly lie, or hypnotic subjects can
be pressured to produce pseudo-memories which can wreak psychological
harm.
UFO and the Bible (The Citadel Press, 1956). Astronomer Morris K. Jessup
believes that many miracles recounted in the Bible provide evidence of alien
visitors sent here as “sheep dogs” to tend the human flock. This was the first
book-length attempt to reconcile the miraculous events in the Bible with the
modern UFO phenomenon and with science. Jessup gives numerous striking
examples to support his view that the UFO is the missing link, or common
denominator, uniting the “miracles” of the Bible with the universal concepts
sought by modern science.
“UFO” defined One of the major confusions besetting UFO research is that of
basic definition. Unfortunately, the term “UFO” (which was coined by Captain
Edward J. Ruppelt, a former chief of the U. S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book)
has been muddied, because it is both a technical term (i.e., given a specific
meaning by various specialists) and a common-language term that has, in
ordinary, everyday usage, taken on certain connotations, such as: UFO =
extraterrestrial spaceship. The acronym has become so common, in fact, that it
was defined in Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, as follows: “any of
the unidentified objects frequently reported, especially since 1947, to have been
seen flying at varying heights and speeds and variously regarded as light
phenomena, hallucinations, secret military missiles, spacecraft from another
planet, et cetera.” It has since been shortened in the 1997 tenth edition of
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as simply: “unidentified flying object;
esp: FLYING SAUCER.”
The dictionary definition is usually intended as a close approximation of
how a word or term is actually used in common practice, i.e., as a word comes
to have a “meaning” in ordinary use. No single person can “assign” an ordinary
use to a word; all must go along with the “meanings” of ordinary language that
have evolved culturally.
This phenomenon was made strikingly clear to me by an experience with my
son. He was five years old at the time (in 1979). I had just compiled the first
Encyclopedia of UFOs (published by Doubleday and NEL in 1980) and
wondered—without having any prior discussions on the matter—what a typical
five-year-old child would have in his mind regarding the subject of UFOs. I
asked my son, Brian: “What is a UFO?” He answered without hesitation, “a
flying saucer.” Just like the new Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,
Brian thought “flying saucer” answered the question. So, I rephrased the
question this way: “What is inside a flying saucer?” To which he replied, matter
of factly: “People from other planets.” Nothing could better illustrate to me that
“UFO” had become a living symbol in our culture for the vehicle that carries
“humanoids from another planet.”
Technical definitions are another matter. Individuals do assign specific
meanings to terms for a specific purpose. “UFO” has many such technical
definitions, which vary from one “expert” to another. The Aerial Phenomena
Research Organization defines a UFO as “any airborne object which cannot be
identified by the witness.” The astronomer Carl Sagan says something similar,
in that “A UFO is a moving aerial or celestial phenomenon, detected visually or
by radar, but whose nature is not immediately understood.” A more precise
definition is that offered by astronomer J. Allen Hynek: “We can define the
UFO simply as the reported perception of an object or light seen in the sky or
upon the land, the appearance, trajectory, and general dynamic and luminescent
behavior of which do not suggest a logical, conventional explanation and which
is not only mystifying to the original percipients but remains unidentified after
close scrutiny of an available evidence by persons who are technically capable
of making a common sense identification, if one is possible.”
There are, of course, instances in which the “UFO” is not “flying” and is not
seemly an “object.” In fact, one possibility often suggested is that UFOs may
be “psychic projections” (i.e., something like a hologram), which would not be
definable as “objects” in the ordinary sense. Although a perfect definition is
probably impossible (since, after all, the subjects of our study are
“unidentified”), it may be advisable to limit the field of UFOlogy to those cases
of sightings and encounters that do not seem (after a thorough and proper study
by qualified persons) to be explainable in terms of any known phenomenon of
nature or man-made device.
—RONALD D. STORY
UFO Enigma, The (Doubleday, 1977). Harvard astrophysicist Donald Menzel

and psychiatrist Ernest Taves heatedly argue in this book that UFOs, ancient
astronaut theories, parapsychology, and other pseudo-sciences are irrational
aberrations which must be eradicated. Miracles described in the Bible have
meteorological explanations. UFO sightings are all the result of liars, hoaxers,
and misidentifications of natural phenomena. The authors admit their
perspective is founded on a belief that we have never been visited, and we will
never be visited by aliens from another star system.
UFO Exist! (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976). Paris Flammonde tries to make a case
that powerful secret cabals “of enormous influence and incalculable economic
strength” control human affairs and have conspired to keep the UFO secret
from humanity. He believes UFOs could represent the private air force of a
non-governmental cabal, or these craft could be a monstrous creation of human
intellect, some sort of energies or entities, over which control has been lost.
“The enigmas may be a more developed stage of life, of which Man is a low
form. The possibility of contact in such a circumstance seems improbable in the
extreme.”
“UFO Incident, The” This made-for-TV movie, starring James Earl Jones and
Estelle Parsons, was first aired on October 20, 1975, on NBC. It was a two-hour,
prime-time special presentation of the alleged UFO-abduction experience of
Betty and Barney Hill.
The Universal/NBC production was based on the book, The Interrupted
Journey (1966) by John Fuller, that chronicled this most famous of all UFO-
abductions, which allegedly occurred in 1961. The movie was repeated many
times and is believed to have triggered a number of other UFO-abduction
reports—as well as the popular image of the classic “Gray” alien. The large
almond-shaped, wraparound eyes, no ears, small nose and mouth, and bald,
oversized cranium—all of these features would later form the standard icon for
the alien image.
Philip Klass, Martin Kottmeyer, and others have pointed out just how
critical the timing of this media event happened to be in UFO-abduction
history. Within weeks after the show, UFO abductions were occurring in
epidemic proportions and have continued that way ever since.
Some believe this TV alien was the prototype for thousands of imaginary abductions by the
“Grays” that were to follow.
Among the famous cases to closely follow the first airing of the show were:
Travis Walton (November 5, 1975), Charles Moody (claimed abduction was on
August 13, 1975, but went public only after the show aired in November), and
the Liberty, Kentucky, abduction (January 6, 1976). These cases, and most of
the succeeding ones, followed the standard format that millions of viewers saw
in “The UFO Incident”:
• captured and taken aboard a “flying saucer”

• undressed and placed on a table
• examined with special instruments, usually with special attention paid to the
reproductive organs
• tour of the ship
• briefing or special message
• return to the original spot where the abduction occurred
• “missing time,” or temporary loss of memory regarding the details of the
event, which are usually recalled later through the use of time-regression
hypnosis
These elements of UFO abduction accounts did not originate with “The
UFO Incident,” but for the first time ever, they were dramatized and shown to
millions of TV viewers—in repeated showings—of a very well-made, realistic
movie that was presented as a true story.
—RONALD D. STORY
UFO Missionaries Extraordinary (Pocket Books, 1976). Hayden Hewes and

Brad Steiger explore the origins of the Heaven’s Gate cult two decades before
most of the group committed mass suicide. From their start as UFO contactees
recruiting followers on the West Coast, leaders Bo and Peep, two former
Houston church choir members, expressed a desire for an ascension “to the
next level” from planet Earth. Their philosophy of salvation by UFOs and the
devotion of their followers remained largely unshaken even after their first
apocalyptic prediction of mass deliverance aboard UFOs failed to come true in
1975.
UFO Retrievals (Blandford, 1995). British researcher Jenny Randles examines

the chronology and evidence for thirty-two UFO crashes worldwide during the
20th century. She finds at most six accounts which may qualify as potential
candidates for authentic spacecraft. But “the majority of evidence is peppered
with misperception, mistaken identity and a pinch of fabrication.”
UFO Verdict, The (Prometheus Books, 1986). Robert Sheaffer concludes in

this book that UFOs do not exist because they spring entirely from the
imaginations of the observers. UFO photos are all hoaxes, for example, because
“all supposed UFO photographs produced to date have been taken by a single
photographer, using a single camera.”
UFOlogy (Celestial Arts, 1973). James M. McCampbell, a nuclear power

technician, theorizes that UFOs and their propulsion systems are
electromagnetic energy phenomena. He cites numerous cases where the
reported effects of UFOs—such as their interference with auto electrical
systems and television and radio transmissions—resemble electromagnetic
energy effects, especially those produced by microwaves.
UFOlogy Originally defined by Morris K. Jessup (in 1955) as follows:

“UFOlogy (You-fol-o-gy) has been coined in The UFO Annual to cover the
field of investigation of what the Air Force has called Unidentified Flying
Objects. Thus we have the science and study of the Unidentified Flying
Object.”
Jessup coined the term in 1955, which appeared in his book The UFO
Annual, when it was published in 1956—the same year the term “ufology” also
appeared, without any definition or explanation, in Britain’s Flying Saucer
Review (January-February 1956 issue); so, it appears that credit must be shared
between these two sources.
The term first found its way into The World Book Dictionary in 1969.
UFOlogy (or ufology) is presently defined in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate
Dictionary simply as “the study of unidentified flying objects.” (This entry was
prepared from research conducted by Richard W. Heiden for the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization in 1983.)
—ETEP STAFF
References
Flying Saucer Review (Jan.-Feb. 1956)
Heiden, Richard W. “The Word ‘UFOlogy’,” The A.P.R.O. Bulletin (Vol. 31, No. 10, 1983).
Jessup, Morris K. The UFO Annual (The Citadel Press, 1956).
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition (Merriam-Webster, 1993; 1997).
UFOnauts, The (Fawcett, 1976). Ghost hunter Hans Holzer thinks space
visitors are abducting humans for breeding experiments because they find
something about us appealing. He says these alien abductors resemble us, with
the same sexual appetites, and do not “consider us totally unworthy” or they
would not seek us out for breeding.
UFO’s—A Scientific Debate (Cornell University Press, 1972) edited by Carl

Sagan & Thornton Page. This book summarizes the proceedings of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science special symposium held
in December 1969. Fifteen American scientists challenge each other and the
evidence of whether extraterrestrial visitation is physically real.
UFO’s: Nazi Secret Weapon? (Samisdat, 1975) In this Canandian published

tract, Mattern Friedrich claims that Adolf Hitler and a group of Nazi scientists
escaped to Antarctica in flying saucers and account for the subsequent spate of
worldwide UFO reports. Extraterrestrial visitors from another galaxy may have
given the Nazis a helping hand in designing these craft because the Germans
spoke a universal technological language.
UFOs Explained (Random House, 1974). In his second book about the UFO
phenomenon Philip Klass drops his theory that plasmas can account for
sightings to argue that other logical scientific explanations can be found for any
seemingly unexplained occurrence. He dissects a few dozen sightings to show
how misidentifications of natural phenomena explain some, while others are
simply hoaxes promulgated by publicity seekers and the greedy.
UFOs—Identified (Random House, 1968). Aviation magazine writer Philip

Klass began his career as a UFO debunker with this book in which he
attempted to offer an unusual natural explanation for a series of UFO sightings
in New Hampshire recounted in John G. Fuller’s book, Incident at Exeter.
UFOs may be produced by a family of plasmas which include ball lightning
and other freak atmospheric phenomena, Klass concluded, abandoning his
previously held belief UFOs were just the result of hoaxes or misidentifications
of conventional aircraft. When his plasma theory attracted considerable
skepticism and ridicule from atmospheric scientists, Klass discarded the idea
and fell back upon a strategy of trying to prove UFOs were mostly hoaxes and
misperceptions of natural and human objects.
UFOs—Operation Trojan Horse (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970). John A. Keel
writes that entities that are cosmic tricksters have deceived humans into
thinking UFOs are extraterrestrial in origin. He warns that dabbling in the UFO
subject can cause paranoia and schizophrenia, and recommends that parents
forbid their children from becoming involved.
UFOs Over the Americas (Signet/NAL, 1968) by Jim and Coral Lorenzen.
This book carries a quote on the cover by Carl Jung: “I hope you will continue
your courageous fight for the truth.” The Lorenzens think the truth may be that
UFOs are projected images to deceive us and that the CIA has infiltrated
civilian UFO groups to manipulate them, perhaps even their own group, The
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). They suggest that UFOs
might be projected images of what contactees want to see, or what UFO
occupants want them to see. Even though our technical equipment, our own
minds, and the UFOs themselves may be deceiving us, it is the CIA that
remains the chief agent of deception.
UFOs: What on Earth Is Happening? (Harvest House, 1975). John Weldon

and Zola Levitt make an evangelical Christian case that demons pilot UFOs and
they are preparing humanity for a satanic dictatorship under the Antichrist.
These demons are manipulating the magnetic field of our planet “to affect the
perceptions of those who see or contact them.”
Ultimate Encounter (Pocket Books, 1978). Bill Barry recounts the story of
Travis Walton, an Arizona woodcutter zapped by a UFO in front of six co-
workers, who subsequently disappeared for five days and resurfaced claiming
to have been abducted by aliens. His story was made into a movie and
continues to generate controversy.
UMMO affair UMMO is, without any doubt, the longest-running hoax in
UFOlogy. It drove wedges between believers and nonbelievers—between those
who had received the “Good News” purveyed by the Space Brothers and those
who took a more skeptical approach. The scientific jargon which characterized
the UMMO reports led many to consider it the real thing.
The Ummites—tall, blond visitors from the planet UMMO, located some 14
light-years away from Earth—would have been perfectly at home in the
company of Adamski’s Venusians or the tall Nordics which have become part
and parcel of modern UFOlogical taxonomy. Often endowed with names like
DEI 98, ASOO 3, and IAUDU 3, they purportedly represented a civilization
which had overcome planetary disharmony and mastered the secret of
spaceflight (but apparently not the use of lowercase letters), trekking
throughout neighboring solar systems in their OAWOLEA UEWA OEM, which
humans referred to as “flying saucers.”
These putative space travelers were in possession of a science completely
undreamed of by human thinkers: their numerical system operated on a base of
12 rather than 10; they had discovered that the link between body and soul was
a chain of 84 atoms of krypton lodged in the hypothalamus; their physicists had
rejected our concept of Euclidean geometry and discovered that the universe
was formed of an unsuspected number of dimensions and that matter, energy,
and mass were in fact the result of three independent axes known collectively
as IBOZOO UU. It was precisely this control of IBOZOO UU which enabled
them to leave their homeworld and reach our solar system in some seven or
eight months of travel time. Ummite cosmologists spoke of a “multiverse,” the
WAAM-WAAM, and were fascinated by magnetohydrodynamics, which they
employed to power the small remote spheres (UULEWA) employed by their
agents on Earth.
All information concerning their society, organization, and beliefs was
gleaned from endless, erudite “reports” aimed at familiarizing humans with
their culture, and acquainting humans with their perspective on our affairs, such
as war, inequality, etc. These reports were allegedly transmitted by means of
dictation to a human typist (who was strictly ordered never to attempt contact
with the addressees), and then sent to scientists, philosophers, and broad-
minded individuals who, in the Ummites’ opinion, would be able to understand
them and put them to good use.
A 1968 article appearing in Spain’s conservative ABC newspaper openly
discussed the existence of an “extraterrestrial colony” operating within that
country at the time. The source of this information was a Catholic priest, Father
Eduardo López, whose secondhand knowledge of the UMMO affair had been
misconstrued by an eager journalist who wished to create the impression that
the priest was actually in contact with the supposed aliens.
None of this quenched the public’s appetite for UMMO, its progressive
society, and its marvelous machinery. In 1971, the First UMMO Conference,
organized by Rafael Farriols, was held outside Madrid. The public was treated
to recorded readings of the various UMMO documents, along with a variety of
slides.
Two years later, the Second UMMO Conference, held in Barcelona, featured
a symposium of readings on humanity’s place in the universe, daily life on
UMMO, and other topics of interest. Farriols’ and Antonio Ribera’s book
UMMO: un caso perfecto (UMMO: A Perfect Case) would appear shortly later.
Jacques Vallée pursued the phenomenon to Argentina, where a medical
establishment dispensing miraculous cures had become UMMO’s most tangible
manifestation to date. In his book Messengers of Deception, Vallée had
intimated the possibility of an espionage link with UMMO as part of the Cold
War. In 1970, a British company known as UMO Plant Hire Ltd. was exposed
as a front for KGB activities. One year later, over a hundred Soviet officials
were expelled from the U.K. under suspicion of espionage, and UMO closed
down.
The distinguished UFOlogist hinted at the strong possibility that UMMO
was in fact some sort of covert exercise by one of the world’s intelligence
agencies, possibly aimed at the creation of a cult which would later be put to
other uses. He was not alone in his observation: it had already been suggested
by certain Spanish investigators that life on UMMO—an antiseptic society
obsessed with personal cleanliness, heavily dependent on gadgetry for every
detail of their existence, flitting about in aircars straight out of The Jetsons—
reflected the ideal futuristic society from an American cultural perspective, thus
hinting at the possible motive behind the entire affair.
—SCOTT CORRALES
Unidentified, The (Warner Books, 1975). Jerome Clark and Loren Coleman
theorize that the UFO phenomenon is a planetary poltergeist generating
apparitions from humankind’s repressed unconscious. Relying upon the work
of Carl Jung, the authors write that the “otherworld” realm of the collective
unconscious produces UFO manifestations and the Men in Black, who
symbolically represent archetypal depictions of the Devil. (Clark, a former
editor of Fate magazine, has since disavowed many of the ideas in this book.)
Uninvited Visitors (Cowles, 1967). Biologist Ivan T. Sanderson believes

UFOs are a form of life sent here to keep watch over the cosmic nursery called
Earth. These life-forms were manufactured by higher intelligence to duplicate a
variety of Earth species and may live in outer space, visiting this planet
periodically to feed on natural and human-produced electricity.
University of Colorado UFO Project In a March 1966 report to the U. S.

Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, an ad hoc Committee to Review Project
Blue Book, chaired by Dr. Brian O’Brien, recommended that the Air Force
contract with several leading universities to conduct comprehensive
investigations into UFO reports. A panel was then created to implement the
recommendations, and confidential inquiries were sent to some well-known
institutions. Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), the University of North Carolina, and the University of California
reportedly declined the Air Force offer.
After further efforts, a contract was signed with the University of Colorado
on October 6, 1966, for a fifteen-month, $313,000 study (later increased to
twenty-four months and $525,000). The project officially began on November
1, 1966, under the direction of Dr. Edward U. Condon of the Department of
Physics and Astrophysics, and terminated on October 31, 1968.
Air Force officials were quick to point out that Condon was both a
distinguished physicist, having made significant wartime contributions to the
development of the atomic bomb and radar, and a staunch individualist, not
likely to be successm]y pressured by the Air Force into explaining UFOs away.
Condon had been a victim of the McCarthy era persecutions, had clashed with
Representative Richard Nixon, and had had his security clearance revoked
twice, in 1953 and 1954.
Condon’s commitment to the project was only half time, so much of the
organizing and direction was left to Robert J. Low, assistant dean of the
Graduate School, who was appointed as full-time project coordinator. Low was
later to become the focus of controversy and dissent within the project. Dr.
Franklin E. Roach, of the Department of Astrogeophysics, contributed 100
percent of his time as a principal investigator, and Dr. Stuart W. Cook, head of
the Department of Psychology, served as the second principal investigator, with
the understanding that his department’s responsibilities would be met by other
faculty members; Dr. David R. Saunders, a psychometrician, agreed to allocate
100 percent of his time as a coprincipal investigator, Dr. William A. Scott, a
social psychologist, contributed 20 percent, and Dr. Michael W. Wertheimer, an
experimental psychologist, also contributed 20 percent. Scott withdrew from
the project after a few months, however.
The project also retained the consulting services of a number of other
specialists, both at the university and elsewhere, in the areas of physics, nuclear
physics, solar physics, meteorology, physical chemistry, electrical engineering,
psychology, and psychiatry. Various research approaches were followed: on-site
field investigations were conducted and radar cases were analyzed, as were
some UFO sightings by U. S. astronauts. Dr. William K. Hartmann, an
astrogeophysicist at the University of Arizona, was contracted to conduct the
photographic analyses. A historical review and an attitude survey were
commissioned, as were various essays on perceptual and psychological
problems, optics, radar, sonic booms, plasmas, and balloons, much of which
had little direct bearing on the UFO question. Stanford Research Institute
(SRI), for example, agreed to prepare the written reviews on optical mirages
and radar anomalies (reportedly for about $50,000), provided their staff did not
have to examine any UFO reports. These reviews appeared as chapters in the
final report.
Most UFO researchers and organizations offered to assist the project, and
consultations were held with many of them, including the head of Project Blue
Book, Major Hector Quintanilla, Jr., its consultant, Northwestern University
astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek; Dr. James E. McDonald, an atmospheric
physicist at the University of Arizona, who had actively been advocating an in-
depth UFO study; and Dr. Jacques Vallée, a French computer specialist, as well
as with officials and members of the two national UFO groups, the Aerial
Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) and the National Investigations
Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). There was a feeling among many
UFO proponents that the Colorado project would make or break the future
study of UFOs, and that it was important to cooperate with, advise, and even
influence the project as much as possible.
The project, however, got off to a precarious start. First, the project staff had
not previously been involved in UFO matters. Although this helped to ensure a
new and impartial analysis of the data, it also meant that valuable time was
expended in attempts to determine what the problem actually was, and how to
go about studying it. The UFO subject, the Colorado investigators found, has
many complex facets, and by the time they felt they were beginning to
understand them, it was time to start writing up the final report.
Second, few of the older “classic” UFO incidents were reinvestigated
because of the difficulty in doing so after several (sometimes many) years.
Rather, it was felt that resources would be better expended in the investigation
of cases reported during the course of the study (only twenty of the fifty-nine
case reports in the final report predated the project). Consequently, a number of
older unexplained cases, which still have not been satisfactorily explained, such
as Exeter, New Hampshire, Ravenna, Ohio (Portage County), and Levelland,
Texas, were not addressed by the project. However, during the course of the
study, a few classic UFO reports were reinvestigated, such as McMinnville,
Oregon (Trent); Great Falls, Montana; Lakenheath-Bentwaters, England; and
some new ones, later to become classics, were tackled for the first time, such as
the Michalak (Falcon Lake, Canada) incident, and the Schirmer (Ashland,
Nebraska) incident. Although tentative or speculative solutions were proposed
for many of these in the final report, publicly released in January of 1969, it has
been estimated that between a third and half of the total case reports remained
unexplained.
Another problem that surfaced early in the project was the approach taken
by the director. Dr. Condon, who had a keen sense of humor, very much
enjoyed the UFO subject, but more for its entertainment value than for the data
it generated. He paid close personal attention to the claims of contactees, but
did not personally participate in any of the field investigations. In short, he felt
that “flying saucers” were merely a nagging social/psychological problem
which the Air Force rightfully wanted buried once and for all, and he
practically admitted as much in a speech in January of 1967, before the project
had barely began, hinting also that the final report would be negative. These
kinds of comments raised many doubts among the individuals and
organizations cooperating with the project (NICAP eventually broke off
relations) and led to conflict within the project.
The situation deteriorated further when, in July of 1967, coprincipal
investigator Saunders and research associate Dr. Norman Levine, an electrical
engineer, found a memorandum written by coordinator Low before the contract
had been awarded. In the memo, addressed to the university’s higher
administration, Low had outlined some of his ideas about the conduct of the
project and the possible perceptions of it by others. He stated that “...the trick
would be, I think, to describe the project so that, to the public, it would appear a
totally objective study, but to the scientific community would present the image
of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective, but having an
almost zero expectation of finding a saucer.”
Low’s unfortunate terminology, particularly the word “trick,” incensed the
two investigators, already bothered by Condon’s derogatory public remarks,
and they sent a copy of the memo to NICAP. James McDonald eventually
received a copy, and he referred to it in a Januwy 31, 1968, letter to Low, who
then reported the matter to Condon. Two days later, on Fedruary 8, 1969,
Condon fired Saunders and Levine from the project for “incompetence.” Soon
afterward, the project’s administrative assistant, Mary Louise Armstrong,
resigned, claiming low morale due to Low’s participation in the project.
Public release of the memo and the firings created nationwide publicity.
Look magazine featured it, and several scentific journals and some
Congressmen began questioning the credibility of the Colorado study. Some
UFO organizations even became convinced that the project was a fraud and that
Condon and Low had conspired with the Air Force to produce a “whitewash.”
Others simply thought that Low, at best, had acted irresponsibly in writing such
a memo and in leaving it in the project’s open files. It should be recognized that
the word “trick” has common usage when referring to a possible solution to a
problem, be it technical or political, and does not necessarily imply deceit. It
can appear deceitful, however, if taken out of context. Condon stated,
furthermore, that he had been unaware of the memo’s existence and that it had
not influenced his direction of the study.
The final months of the project, after the departure of Saunders and Levine,
were quiet ones. Under Condon’s direction, the final report began taking shape.
Low’s participation practically ended in May 1968, and Condon made no more
derogatory public statements. Saunders, meanwhile, published hts own book,
UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong, assisted by Boulder
journalist Roger Harkins. The book represented a sort of “minority report” and
gave an embarrassing “inside story” of the Colorado project from its planning
in September of 1966 until his departure in February of 1968.
In November of 1968, the Condon team completed The Final Report of the
Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects and it was then reviewed by a
special panel set up by the National Academy of Sciences. On January 8, 1968,
NAS submitted its review to the U. S. Air Force. The review fully endorsed the
Colorado report’s scope, methodology, and conclusions. The so-called Condon
Report was released publicly the following day and was published
commercially soon afterward. (See SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF UNIDENTIFIED FLYING
OBJECTS.)
The report left many UFO incidents unexplained, but the conclusions,
written by Condon, were, as predicted by many observers, that UFO
phenomena were not worthy of further scientific study. Condon also stated that
the Earth could not be visited by extraterrestrial intelligence for another 10,000
years, although nobody has determined how this figure was arrived at. These
conclusions were highly publicized by the press, which generally ignored the
case studies in the report, some of which tended to contradict Condon’s
conclusions. It has remained unclear to what extent the other project members
agreed with his conclusions.
The University of Colorado UFO Project had a lasting impact on the study
of UFOs in general and on the scientific community in particular, which
generally accepted Condon’s conclusions without question. It led to the the
closing of Project Blue Book in December of 1969. It remains today as the
most comprehensive federally supported UFO probe, and attempts by private
UFO organizations, some scientists, members of Congress, and even the White
House to initiate a new federal inquiry have not met with success.
—ETEP STAFF
Uri (Doubleday, 1974). American physician Andrija Puharich tells the story of
his friend, Israeli spoon-bender Uri Geller, who claims to have been given his
psychic powers as a three-year-old child by alien visitors to help prepare
humans for alien contact. These visitors from the future—who resemble
“certain exotic types of Japanese” and supposedly materialize their spacecraft
at will—first visited the Earth 20,000 years ago, landing in Israel. They have
made Israel a protected country and the Jews a protected race.
V
Valensole (France) encounter On the morning of July 1, 1965, near

Valensole, France, farmer Maurice Masse reportedly saw an egg-shaped “craft”
resting in his lavender field. The “saucer” stood on six legs and had a door,
through which Masse could see two seats, back to back. Standing by the object
were two small humanoids, who seemed startled by Masse’s presence and
instantly immobilized him. The object then vanished, and the farmer’s
temporary paralysis soon faded away.
It was about 5:45 A.M., and Maurice Masse was finishing a cigarette before
commencing work in his field (named l’Olivol). He was standing near a hillock
of pebbles and rakings by the end of a small vineyard alongside the field.
Suddenly, he heard a whistling noise and glanced around the side of the hillock
expecting to see a helicopter; instead, he saw a “machine,” shaped like a rugby
football, the size of a Dauphine car, standing on six legs connected by a central
pivot. There were also, he said, “two boys of about eight years” near the object,
bending down by a lavender plant.
Incensed, Masse approached stealthily through the vineyard and saw that the
creatures were not boys at all; he broke cover and advanced toward them.
When he was within fifteen feet (five meters), one turned and pointed a pencil-
like device at him. Masse was stopped in his tracks, unable to move.
According to Masse’s testimony, the creatures were less than four feet tall,
and were clad in close-fitting gray-green clothes, without any covering on their
heads. They had “pumpkin-like” heads, high fleshy cheeks, large eyes which
slanted away, mouths without lips, and very pointed chins. They made
“grumbling” noises from their middles.
Masse will not disclose what else happened during the encounter, saying
merely that they returned to their “machine.” He said he could see them looking
at him from inside, while the legs whirled and retracted. With a thump from the
central pivot, the machine took off to float silently away. At twenty meters, it
just disappeared, although traces of its passage in the direction of Manosque
were reportedly found on lavender plants for four hundred meters.
When he recovered mobility, so the story goes, a confused and frightened M.
Masse rushed back to Valen sole. There, the proprietor of the Café des Sports
saw him and, alarmed by his appearance, questioned him. Masse blurted out
part of his story; the proprietor could not contain himself, and the news quickly
broke.
—AIMÉ MICHEL & CHARLES BOWEN
Vallée, F. Jacques (b. 1939). French computer scientist, world-renowned

UFO investigator—and real-life model for “Lacombe” in the film Close
Encounters of the Third Kind. Dr. Jacques Vallée, a former principal
investigator on Department of Defense computer networking projects, was born
in France, where he was trained in astrophysics. He moved to the United States
in 1962 and received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1967 from Northwestern
University, where he was a close associate of the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
The author of numerous articles and three books about high technology, Dr.
Vallée first became interested in UFOs when he witnessed the destruction of
tracking tapes of unknown objects at a major observatory. His research into the
phenomenon has taken him to many places in the United States and to many
countries around the world, including France, Scotland, Australia, Brazil, and
Russia.
Jacques Vallée
Vallée has published dozens of scientific articles in British, French, and

American professional journals, and twelve books in English on UFOs:
Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965); Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma
(with his wife, Janine Vallée, 1966), Passport to Magonia (1969), The Edge of
Reality (with J. Allen Hynek, 1975), The Invisible College (1975), Messengers
of Deception (1979), Dimensions (1988), UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union
(1989), Confrontations (1990), Revelations (1991), Forbidden Science (1992),
and Fastwalker (1996), a novel..
Address: 1550 California St. #6L

San Francisco, CA 94109
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: I propose the hypothesis that there is a control system

for human consciousness. I have not been able to determine whether it is natural
or spontaneous; whether it is explainable in terms of genetics, of social
psychology, or of ordinary phenomena—or if it is artificial in nature and under
the power of some superhuman will. It may be entirely determined by laws that
we have not yet discovered....
I am suggesting that what takes place through close encounters with UFOs is
control of human beliefs, control of the relationship between our consciousness
and physical reality, that this control has been in force throughout history and
that it is of secondary importance that it should now assume the form of
sightings of space visitors.
It could represent the Visitor Phenomenon of Whitley Strieber or some form
of “supernature,” possibly along the lines of the Gaia hypothesis.
Alternately, in a Jungian interpretation of the same theme, the human
collective unconscious could be projecting ahead of itself the imagery which is
necessary for our own long-term survival beyond the unprecedented crises of
the twenty-first century.
When the object we call UFO is visible to us in the reality of everyday life, I
think it constitutes both a physical entity with mass, inertia, volume, etc. which
we can measure, and a window toward another mode of reality for at least some
of the percipients. Is this why witnesses can give us at the same time a
consistent narrative and a description of contact with forms of life that fit no
acceptable framework? These forms of life may be similar to projections; they
may be real, yet a product of our dreams. Like our dreams, we can look into
their hidden meaning, or we can ignore them. But like our dreams, they may
also shape what we think of as our lives in ways that we do not yet understand.
—JACQUES VALLÉE
(Position statement was adapted from an interview in the February 1978 issue of
Fate magazine and from Vallée’s books The Invisible College and Revelations.)
Valentich (Bass Strait, Australia) UFO encounter On the evening of

October 21, 1978, Mr. Frederick Valentich, a twenty-year-old civilian pilot,
disappeared while on a solo fight between Moorabbin airport, Victoria,
Australia-across Bass Strait-and King Island, in a single-engine Cessna 182
aircraft.
At about 7:06 P.M., Valentich radioed Melbourne Air Flight Service with a
report that “a large aircraft” with “four bright lights” passed close to his plane,
then apparently hovered over him, at which time Valentich began experiencing
engine trouble followed by a radio “blackout.”
A taped transcript of the conversation between Valentich and Melbourne Air
Flight Service controller Steve Robey contains the following dialogue between
pilot and ground:
7:06 P.M.: Pilot to ground: “Is there any known traffic in my area below
5,000 feet?”
Flight Service Unit: “Negative—No known traffic.”
Pilot: “Seems to be a large aircraft below 5,000 feet.”
Ground: “What type of aircraft?”
Pilot: “I cannot confirm. It has four bright lights that appear to be
landing lights...aircraft has just passed over me about 1,000 feet above.”
Ground: “Is large aircraft confirmed?”
Pilot: “Affirmative; at the speed it is traveling are there any RAAF
(Royal Australian Air Force) aircraft in vicinity?”
Ground: “Negative.” Ground: “What is your altitude?” Pilot: “4,500
feet.”
Ground: “Confirm you cannot identify aircraft?”
Pilot: “Affirmative.”
Then, three minutes after his original transmission, Valentich reported again:
“Aircraft...It’s not an aircraft. It’s (break in transmission)
Ground: “Can you describe aircraft?”
Pilot: “It’s flying past. It has a long shape. Cannot identify more than
that...coming for me right now. It seems to be stationary. I’m orbiting and
the thing is orbiting on top of me. It has a green light and sort of metallic
light on the outside.”
Valentich then told ground control the object had vanished.

Ground: “Confirm it has vanished?”
Pilot: “Affirmative. Do you know what sort of aircraft I’ve got? Is it
military?”
Ground: “No military traffic in the area.”
7:12 P.M.: Pilot: “Engine is rough idling and coughing.”
Ground: “What are your intentions?”
Pilot: “Proceeding King Island. Unknown aircraft now hovering on top
of me.”
Ground: “Acknowledge.”
The pilot’s final transmission was: “Delta Sierra Juliet [Valentich’s call sign]
Melbourne...” followed by seventeen seconds of a loud metallic sound. Thus
began the mystery, which has yet to be satisfactory explained. An extensive
search in Bass Strait failed to turn up any trace of the pilot or his plane.
A number of suggestions have been made in an attempt to explain the
patently bizarre circumstances of Valentich’s disappearance. Suicide, hoax,
disorientation, UFO abduction, and a host of other theories have been put
forward—none of which has ended the mystery. But Valentich’s enigmatic
conversation with Melbourne Flight Service demands that we at least consider
the evidence for some sort of UFO connection.
Perhaps predictably, many people reported seeing UFOs on the same day
and during the night of Valentich’s disappearance. While many of these
sightings might have been generated by some sort of hysterical contagion
mechanism, some of the reports remain difficult to explain. Some fifteen
distinct sightings have survived the gauntlet of civilian research group
investigations. They all occurred between midday and 9 P.M. on October 21. Six
of these occurred in Victoria, one on King Island; and the rest in New South
Wales, Tasmania, and South Australia. These reports seem to confirm that
something quite odd was happening on that day.
While the precedent for UFO activity on the same day as Valentich’s
disappearance is remarkable in itself, the situation becomes even more
extraordinary, when one considers the UFO precedent for the areas that figure
in the Valentich mystery—namely Cape Otway (his last land call), Bass Strait
(the apparent location of his disappearance), and King Wand (his apparent
destination).
During a two-month period, centered around January 1978, vacationers,
fishermen, schoolteachers, local police, and lighthouse keepers in the Cape
Otway area, saw UFOs.
Even earlier, during July 1977, local residents and the lighthouse keeper at
Cape Otway saw an inexplicable brilliant light source that hovered out to sea
for half an hour. Estimates of its brilliance were made, which suggested that the
airborne power would have been of the order of five kilowatts (for a pencil-
beam source) and fifteen megawatts (for an omni-directional source).
As we move out over Bass Strait, more curious mysteries are evident. A
number of planes have disappeared or gone down there without a trace. A few
years ago, a Tiger Moth with two people on board vanished, apparently only
within a few miles of Cape Otway. In 1969, a pilot and his Fuji aircraft
apparently went down in the sea, again only a few miles from the Cape.
During February 1944, a Beaufort bomber crew gained a most unusual
companion out over the Strait, at an altitude of 4,500 feet. At about 2:20 A.M., a
“dark shadow” appeared with what looked like a flickering light and flame
belching from its aft end. The “unknown” stayed with the plane at a distance of
some 100 to 150 feet, for eighteen to twenty minutes, during which time all
radio and direction-finding instruments failed to function. It finally accelerated
away from the plane at approximately three times the speed of the bomber—
some 700 mph.
In October 1935, the Tasmanian airliner, the “Loina,” crashed “unseen” into
Bass Strait, while on route to Flinders Island. Some wreckage was found, but
no bodies were recovered.
One year earlier, during the morning of October 19, 1934, the new
Tasmanian mailplane, “Miss Hobart,” with twelve passengers on board,
disappeared without a trace, apparently within a few miles of Wilson’s
Promontory. Two surveyors in the area heard the plane pass over; however,
they were baffled when the engine sound suddenly ceased. A large, motionless
white “flare” was seen from a surface vessel near Cape Liptrap. The ship went
to investigate and saw another light, this time pink in color. To put a final seal
on the whole mystery, the “Miss Hobar” had not even been carrying flares!
Back in July 1920, a schooner went missing in Bass Strait. An extensive air-
sea search, by contemporary standards, was initiated. Rather than solve the
mystery, the search served only to compound it. Crews and captains on two
ships reported seeing “large flares,” which they thought must have been from
the missing schooner. Captain J. Stut and Sergeant A. G. Daizell flew toward
the area where the flares were observed. They and their plane, along with the
schooner, were never seen again.
The Melbourne Argus newspaper of the day, even tells us of many people
reportedly seeing “cigar shaped” objects flying over the Strait, as far back as
1896
King Island’s 425 square miles played host to a “mini-flap” of unidentified
nocturnal aerial lights for at least three months prior to the disappearance of
Frederick Valentich. Oval-shaped lights followed cars and mystified local
residents. Strange lights or flares appeared off the north shore of New Year
Island.
One of the most spectacular sightings of a UFO in the area, occurred at a
wild and uninhabited part of the King Island coast, near Whistler Point, just
before dawn, on April 10, 1976. “A beam of light” emanating from a “cross-
shaped object” approached a duck-shooter’s car, in a direct line. The light
display, eventually receded directly along its line of approach, ending a silent
inspection, when it disappeared over the distant skyline.
Conflicting evidence, and the reluctance of certain officials to release their
information, has effectively short-circuited any legitimate conclusions. The
evidence presented here in summary form indicates that if some other
explanation for the disappearance of Valentich and the Cessna aircraft is not
forthcoming, then the possibility of some sort of UFO connection must be
considered. As is stands now, the disappearance of the pilot and his plane
remains a mystery.
Van Tassel, George (1910-1978). Van Tassel was a major UFO contactee,
theoretician, and entrepreneur. He was operator of the Giant Rock Airport, where
he hosted the fabled Giant Rock Space Conventions, at which important
contactees and their followers gathered annually, between 1954 and 1970.
Furthermore, Van Tassel was founder and leading light of the Ministry of
Universal Wisdom, incorporated in 1958, and the related College of Universal
Wisdom. These nearly one-man organizations, which among other activities
built a large structure for research known as the “Integratron,” were concerned
with the advancement of “science and scientific philosophy,” partly on the basis
of principles believed communicated by UFOs.
From 1927 until 1947 Van Tassel was employed in a variety of positions by
such major aviation concerns as Douglas, Hughes, and Lockheed. In 1947 he
moved to Giant Rock to manage the airport.
In 1951, he became absorbed in the UFO contactee movement, beginning
with his own contact. In that year, he reportedly went into a trance at the base
of the huge rock, for which Giant Rock is named, and was taken up to meet the
“Council of Seven Lights,” a body of discarnate Earthlings inhabiting a
spaceship circling our planet. Then on August 24, 1952, according to his book I
Rode a Flying Saucer, he was sleeping in the desert with his wife when he was
awakened by an alien named Solgonda, whose ship was hovering nearby. His
wife continued sleeping, but Van Tassel went aboard with the extraordinary
visitors. This dramatic encounter led directly to the first Space Convention the
following spring.
Later writings of Van Tassel expounded complex theories, derived from
OSCs (Outer Space Contacts), that the human race is partly nonterrestial in
origin, and that cosmic reality can be reduced to “resonances.” He built the
four-storey-high nonmetallic “Integratron” containing an electrostatic armature
55 feet in diameter, driven by air turbines and jets. The huge apparatus was
never wholly completed, but was designed for the purpose of “research into the
unseen truths of life” and particularly to develop technologies to rejuvenate the
elderly and prevent aging.
George Van Tassel
The colorful “Sage of Giant Rock” was a popular media personality. He

appeared as guest on over 400 radio and television shows during his life and
gave nearly 300 lectures in the United States and Canada. Besides I Rode a
F7ying Saucer, his books include: Into This World and Out Again, The Council
of Seven Lights, Religion and Science Merged, and When Stars Look Down.
George Van Tassel was married and had three daughters. The hospitality of
Giant Rock was legendary among UFO buffs who made the trek to the remote
desert airport to meet the “Grand Old Man” of the contactee world. His
extensive friend-ships, lectures, mailings, and above all the Giant Rock Space
Convention made him a pivotal figure to that world—one whose presence did
much to give it coherence and vitality. He was an American individualist of
strong character in the classic mold of the weathered pioneer, the aviator of the
“barnstorming” era, and the tinkering backyard inventor, to which was added
the newer mystiques of space and other worlds. With him, a UFO epoch also
passed.
Varginha (Brazil) encounters of 1996 On January 20, 1996, at 0100 hrs., a

farmer outside the prosperous Brazilian city of Varginha was startled to observe
a strange vehicle about the size of a small bus hovering some sixteen feet above
the ground. The silent, darkened craft appeared to have sustained damage to its
fuselage and spewed smoke as it moved away slowly toward Varginha.
At 0830 hrs., the Varginha Fire Department received an anonymous phone
call regarding the presence of a “bizarre creature” in the Jardim Andere
neighborhood. Suspecting a prank, the firemen nonetheless responded to the
call and were surprised to find a group of adults and children already hot in
pursuit of the “creature,” which was hiding in a gully within a small wooded
area. The firemen managed to capture the creature by means of a net, and
dragged it out. The civilian onlookers would later inform investigators that the
being offered no resistance to its captors, and was placed in a wooden box
which was driven away by a truck belonging to the Brazilian Army.
Apparently there was more than one nonhuman creature on the loose, and a
mopup operation had been ordered by the military. Residents of Jardim Andere
claimed to have seen platoons in combat gear scouring the area, punctuating
their actions with occasional bursts of automatic fire. Two more beings,
unceremoniously dumped into bags, were allegedly taken away by the military.
At 1530 hrs. that same day, the Da Silva sisters, Valquiria and Liliana (ages
14 and 16 respectively) and their friend Katia Xavier, 22, were returning home
from work and decided to cut across a field along a street not far from where
the Varginha firemen had captured the first creature. As the threesome crossed
the field, they suddenly noticed a “man” with bulging blood-red eyes, greasy
brown skin, and a bald head with noticeable veins and strange osseous
protuberances. The strange mannikin was huddling in fear next to a brick wall,
its hands between its legs. Astonishment soon gave way to fear, and the young
women broke into a mad dash to reach the safety of their homes.
Exactly twenty-four hours after the presumably crippled UFO hovered over
a farm on Varginha’s outskirts, the Brazilian military was in possession of at
least three extraterrestrial biological entities (EBEs). At 0130 hrs., under cover
of darkness, Army trucks moved their prized catch to Humanitas Hospital,
apparently until the fate of the alien creatures had been determined. UFOlogists
on the scene believe the creatures were subjected to a battery of medical tests,
and that at least one of them died at the hospital.
On January 22, 1996, the alien bodies were transferred to the refrigerated lab
section of the University of Campiñas, where a number of distinguished
pathologists would have had access to them. By all accounts, there was a
considerable military presence on the campus.
The military’s cover-up unraveled when an Army officer was interviewed on
Brazilian television, discussing his role in the operations involving the transfer
of the putative aliens to the hospital, where the initial tests were conducted.
But the Varginha story continued long after the initial events: On the evening
of April 21, 1996, Teresa Clepf had gone out to dinner at a restaurant located
within the confines of the Varginha Zoo. Mrs. Clepf had stepped out onto the
restaurant’s covered porch to smoke a cigarette when she noticed a figure
moving in the darkness, lighting its way with blood-red eyes. She then returned
into the restaurant to collect her thoughts before going out again: the creature
was still there, staring back at her.
According to UFOlogist Claudeir Covo, a number of zoo animals died
shortly after the creature was reported. Veterinarians at the Varginha Zoo
diagnosed the strange deaths as “caustic intoxication,” and discouraged any
speculation that the animals may have been infected by an alien disease borne
by the creature.
—SCOTT CORRALES
Villas Boas abduction Many researchers and writers agree that if UFOlogy
could be summed up by a single case, it would be the one involving the
experiences of Brazilian farmer Antonio Villas Boas.
Villas Boas, twenty-three years old at the time of the ordeal, was a farmer by
profession. He lived on a fazenda on the outskirts of São Francisco de Sales,
Minas Gerais, where it was customary to work day and night shifts during the
planting season, he himself being responsible for nocturnal planting.
On October 5, 1957, Villas Boas went to bed at 11:00 P.M. following a party
at the farmhouse. He and his younger brother Joáo were witnesses to a strange
nocturnal light which lit up the entire room.
Ten days later—on the night of October 15—Antonio Villas Boas would
have his historic experience. While driving his tractor, he noticed a shining star
that increased in brightness, as if descending to earth. The light turned into a
very shiny oval object headed straight for him. He tried to escape by speeding
up the tractor, but the object had already landed some 10 to 15 meters ahead: It
resembled a large, elongated egg with three spurs in front.
Seized by terror, Antonio jumped off the tractor in hopes of eluding his
pursuers, but the furrowed terrain made a speedy getaway impossible. He was
then seized by a small figure wearing a “strange outfit” and a helmet. The
farmer managed to knock it to the ground, but three more similarly-dressed
figures overpowered him and bore him off to the waiting craft.
Villas Boas struggled and hurled insults at his helmeted captors even as the
humanoids dragged him into the craft, where he was stripped naked and
subjected to several indignities. His captors drew a blood sample from his chin
using a chalice-like device, and after slathering him with a strange liquid over
his entire body, he was taken to a room—unfurnished but for a couch—where
he was left alone for some twenty minutes, by his account. At this point, a
mixture of fear, nausea and coldness, coupled with the stench of a strange gas
that was pumped into the room, led him to vomit in one of the corners.
“After a long time,” Villas Boas said, “a noise at the door startled me. I
turned in that direction and was shocked to see that it was now open and a
woman was entering the room, walking toward me. She was approaching
slowly, perhaps amused at the astonishment that must have been visible on my
face. My jaw had dropped and with good reason. This woman was completely
naked, as was I, and barefoot. She was also pretty, although different from the
women I’d known. Her hair was an almost whitish shade of blonde, as if
peroxided, straight and not very abundant, neck-length and with the ends curled
inward. Her eyes were blue and large, more narrow than round and slanted
outward—like the pencil-painted eyes of those girls who fancy themselves
Arabian princesses and make their eyes look slanted; that’s what they were like.
Only it was a completely natural effect, since there was no paint at all
involved.”
The strange liquid which had been spread over his body, apparently some
sort of aphrodisiac, began to work as Antonio felt less tense as the small
woman began to caress him, ultimately seducing him. “It sounds incredible,” he
confessed to Fontes and Martins during the interview, “given the situation I was
in. I believe that the liquid they rubbed on me was the cause of it. All I know is
that I felt an uncontrollable sexual excitement, which had never happened to
me before. I forgot about everything and held the woman, returning her
caresses with my own. We ended up on the couch, where we had sexual
relations for the first time. It was a normal act and she responded like any
woman. Then came a period of more caressing followed by more sexual
relations. In the end, she was tired and breathing quickly. I was still excited, but
she now refused and tried to get away. When I noticed that, I cooled down too.
That was what they wanted from me, a good stallion to improve their stock.”
The door opened once more and two of the “crewmen” appeared,
summoning the woman away. Before leaving, she turned to the farmer and
pointed at her belly, then pointing at him, and finally at the heavens. Curiously,
Villas Boas took this to mean that “she would return to take me to where it was
she came.”
Artist’s rendering of a scene inside the space ship, as described by Villas Boas (Drawing by
Gloria Alderson)
After having served as breeding stock, Antonio was unceremoniously led off
the vehicle, which took off immediately. Returning to his tractor, Villas Boas
learned that the time was now five thirty in the morning. Estimating that it had
been around 1:15 a.m. when he was abducted, his entire experience had lasted
some four hours and fifteen minutes.
After his traumatic experience, Villas-Boas withdrew from public life to
pursue his studies, earning a law degree and becoming a practicing attorney in
the city of Formosa, Goias, while running a small business on the side. He died
in late 1992 in the city of Uberaba, in Brazil’s Triángulo Minero.
In June 1993, the late Dr. Walter K. Buhler, president of Brazil’s SBDEDV
organization, revealed that between 1962-63 his organization had received an
anonymous letter from the U.S., inviting Villas Boas to visit this country in
order to examine a recovered flying saucer in the possession of the American
military. Villas Boas’s son advised Buhler that his father had indeed visited the
United States to inspect the object, but had kept silent about the visit for the rest
of his life.
—SCOTT CORRALES
Von Däniken, Erich (b. 1935). Born in Zofingen, Switzerland, Erich von
Däniken was educated at the College of Saint-Michel, in Fribourg, where even
as a student he occupied his time with the study of ancient holy writings. While
managing director of a Swiss five-star hotel, he wrote his first book, Chariots
of the Gods? (1968), which quickly became an international bestseller.
Von Däniken has since written twenty-five more books; his most recent
being Odyssey of the Gods: The Alien History of Ancient Greece (2000). He is
internationally known as the leading popular spokesman for the ancient
astronaut theory. In fact, with sales approaching 58 million copies (translated
into 28 different languages), he must be considered one of the most successful
authors of all time.
In the United States, von Däniken won instant fame as a result of the
television special In Search of Ancient Astronauts in 1970. In 1993, the German
television station SAT-1 ran a twenty-five part TV series with von Däniken
entitled Aug den Spuren der All-Mächtigen (“Pathways of the Gods”). Since
then, von Däniken has done other film work with both American and German
TV companies, which is ongoing.
Address: Chalet Aelpli CH-3803 Beatenberg Switzerland
E-mail: evd@aas-fg.org
Web site: www.Daniken.com
POSITION STATEMENT: Unfortunately, I have never had the chance to see a

UFO with my own eyes. Among UFO believers you find a great number of
hysteric, credulous, intimidated, hoping, and good honest people. Real scientists
are rather scarce among them.
Erich von Däniken
Some reports on UFOs which I have followed-up personally have made me

startled. Take this Pascagoula case. I have had a lengthy discussion at the time
with Charlie Hickson. Today I am of the opinion that there does in fact exist
something which we call “unidentified flying objects.” I am convinced that
from time to time strange things are happening around us for which at the
moment we have no reasonable explanation. But don’t ask me what UFOs are. I
simply don’t know. Extraterrestrial visitors? Extraterrestrial technical probes?
Objects of another dimension? Physical phenomena which will only be
explained by the future? Again, I do not know. Considering that the UFO
problem has taken grip of such a huge number of people, I feel that it should be
investigated scientifically. Regardless of whether there are, in fact, UFOs or
not. Perhaps the answer is to be found in psychology or somewhere in the
human brain.
My critics have said that the ancient astronaut theory is dangerous, because
its followers can no longer see the actual problems in our life and instead would
hope for some sort of “salvation from space.” This is real nonsense!
Religious people, regardless what faith they belong to, hope for “salvation
from above.” The greater part of the UFO followers do exactly the same. The
Ancient Astronaut movement, however, sees the problem from the opposite
side.
The extraterrestrials were here thousands of years ago. They have left
behind rules and regulations but also a promise to return in the remote future
(time dilation). Considering that the “Gods” of ancient times did not always
treat mankind gently and quite often became angry and punished brutally, a
“hope from above” is not realistic. Rather the contrary! Mankind should be
prepared technically and also morally for the return of the “Gods.”
—ERICH VON DÄNIKEN
W
walk-in This term describes a process of inter-dimensional, inter-planetary soul

exchange, as well as the individuals who experience it. In this process, a soul
from an older ET or angelic civilization (or a more evolved Earth soul) enters
the voluntarily surrendered body and personality-system of a human being, to
better serve humanity and Earth. Interestingly, some Walk-ins don’t consider
themselves ET souls and have little interest in such matters. In my view,
however, most so-called Walk-ins are actually Wanderers, as I believe that
genuine Walk-ins are far more rare than people imagine.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
Walton abduction This case was the subject of a National Inquirer headline
and cover story, three books, numerous magazine accounts, and a major motion
picture. It made a tidy sum of money for its claimant, Travis Walton, and is
considered a “classic” by the UFO community. The case was supported by the
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), but considered a probable
hoax by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).
Thanks to the leading skeptical UFO investigator, Philip Klass, the probable
truth about the incident was uncovered and reported by NICAP as follows:
A summary of the incident as it was presented by the news media is included
for your information.
On the evening of Nov. 5, 1975, at approximately 6:15 P.M. MST, a crew of
seven young woodcutters, headed by Michael Rogers was returning home.
Rogers (age 28) was under contract to the U.S. Forest Service to thin out 1,277
acres of National Forest land near Turkey Springs. According to the story later
told by Rogers, and other members of his crew (ages 17-25), they saw a UFO
hovering nearby. They claim that Travis Walton jumped out the moving car and
walked/ran und the UFO, that he was “zapped” by, intense glowing beam from
the UFO and that the rest of the crew panicked and drove off , leaving their
friend behind. A short time later, they claim they returned to the spot to seek
Travis but that he had disappeared—seemingly carried off by the UFO. It was
not until more than two hours later that Rogers and his crew decided to report
the incident to Under-Sheriff L. C. Ellison in nearby Heber, Arizona.
While Travis was missing, Rogers and the other five young men took a
polygraph test, on Nov. 10, administered by C. E. Gilson of the Arizol
Department of Public Safety of Phoenix. Five of the young men “passed” the
examination but the results for one (Allen M. Dalis) were “inconclusive,”
according to Gilson. The reported test results have been widely interpreted
endorsing the authenticity of the alleged UFO abduction.
Shortly after midnight on Nov. 11, Travis telephoned his sister, Mrs. Grant
Neff, of Taylor, Arizona (near Snowflake), from a phone booth in Heber, about
30 miles away. Mr. Neff and Travis’ older brother Duane, who had come to
Snowflake from his home in Phoenix shortly after the alleged UFO incident,
both drove to Heber to pick up Travis. They reported finding him crumpled on
the floor of the phone booth, and in a very “confused” mental state. A short
time after returning Travis to his mother’s home in Snowflake, Duane decided
to drive Travis to Phoenix, reportedly to obtain medical assistance. Later that
same day he was examined by two physicians at the request of APRO.
On Feb. 7, 1976, almost three months after Travis’ return, he and Duane
took polygraph tests administered by George J. Pfeifer, then employed by Tom
Ezell & Associates of Phoenix. According to published reports, both men
passed the exam which involved many questions dealing with Travis’ claim of
having been abducted by a UFO. The widely publicized results of these tests
seemed to confirm that such an incident actually occurred.
In evaluating the authenticity of such a case, UFO researchers must
concentrate on the validity of available data. After reading the reports published
by other organizations and national newspapers, one would think that the
Walton case was a very strong one for the following reasons:
It was reported that:

1. Walton passed the polygraph examination.
2. There were six other witnesses. Five of the six passed the polygraph
examination.
3. Walton is of high character.
4. Walton and his family had very little prior interest in UFOs. Therefore, it
would be unlikely that he would concoct a story relating to U FOs.
5. None of the other six witnesses had any motivation to participate in a hoax.
For the information of NICAP members, these points are discussed in detail.
They give even stronger indication that NICAP’s original conclusion is the
correct one, i.e., the case is a hoax.
WALTON’S POLYGRAPH EXAMINATION
Mr. Philip Klass revealed to NICAP that a lie detector test had been
administered to Travis Walton THREE MONTHS EARLIER, ON
NOVEMBER 15, 1975. WALTON FAILED THE POLYGRAPH
EXAMINATION AT THAT TIME.
This first test was given in the Sheraton Hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, on the
afternoon of November 15. The arrangements for the examination were made
by Mr. James Lorenzen, APRO’s director, and the test was paid for by the
National Enquirer. The examination was administered by Mr. John J.
McCarthy, director of the Arizona Polygraph Laboratory in Phoenix. Mr.
McCarthy’s credentials are excellent. He was trained at the Army’s polygraph
school at Fort Gordon. Mr. McCarthy is a member of the American Polygraph
Association and has been licensed by the State of Illinois since 1964. At
present, Arizona does not require that polygraph examiners be licensed to
practice in the state.
The examiner reported his findings as instructed to the National Enquirer
and Dr. James Harder, APRO’s director of research, immediately upon the
completion of the test taken by Walton. Dr. Harder reported that information to
APRO’s James Lorenzen.
McCarthy was further instructed to send a written report to the National
Enquirer. The Enquirer instructed McCarthy not to reveal that he had tested
Walton. An excerpt from the report which was sent is, “Attempting to
perpetrate a UfO hoax, and that he has not been on any spacecraft.” The report
further stated that Travis Walton had tried unsuccessfully to distort his
respiration pattern in an attempt to deceive the examiner. However, he was
unsuccessful.
APRO published a full account of the Travis Walton case in their November
1975 newsletter which included the events that had transpired during week
following Travis’ return through November 16. No mention of the November
15 lie detector test was included.
Mr. Klass has hard physical evidence in his possession, which has been
checked by NICAP, that Mr. McCarthy did test Travis Walton on November 15,
1975, and that Walton failed test. The evidence includes such documents as:
1. The polygraph examination statement of consent dated Nov. 15, 1975, and
signed by Travis Walton.
2. McCarthy’s written report to the National Enquirer dated Nov. 16, 1975,
which includes his conclusion that the UFO account was a hoax.
3. The voucher receipt from the National Enquirer payable to McCarthy’s
Arizona Polygraph Laboratory dated Jan. 14, 1976, for “Travis Walton
UFO Incident.”
4. Agreement to conduct test and supply report to National Enquirer. This
statement is dated Feb. 1, 1976, rather than Nov. 15, 1975. This is clearly a
typographical error.
Three months after Travis Walton failed the first polygraph exam, he took
another one administered by George J. Pfeifer, an examiner with only two
years’ experience, who was employed by Tom Ezell Associates of Phoenix. The
results of this test were wide publicized because he seemingly passed the test
with flying colors. Mr. Klass discovered that Travis Walton dictated the
questions that he wanted to be asked. Mr. Pfeifer complied with Walton’s
request. To check the validity of the method of testing, the president of Tom
Ezell Associates, Mr. Tom Ezell, was contacted. He stated that it is perfectly
proper for the sponsor of a test {APRO) to indicate the area: which should be
explored. However Mr. Ezell in later correspondence with Mr. Klass stated,
“Because of the dictation of questions to be asked, this test should be
invalidated.” He further stated that after examining the Travis Walton charts,
“The reactions on the charts, to my way of interpretation, would not be
readable. You would not be able to say if he [Travis Walton] is telling the truth
or if he’s lying.”
CORROBORATING WITNESSES’
POLYGRAPH EXAMINATIONS
As reported in the January 1976 issue of the UFO Investigator, the

polygraph exam given to the other alleged witnesses was designed to determine
whether or not Walton might be the victim of foul play insti gated by his
associates. Three of the four relevant questions asked during the test dealt
entirely with this issue. The test was given by C.E. Gilson, an examiner with
five years’ experience. His statement to Mr. Klass was, “That was our sole
purpose...to determine whether or not there had been a crime committed.” The
single question about the UFO was added at the request of Sheriff Gillespie.
Gilson stressed. “That one question does not make it a valid test as far as
verifying the UFO incident.”
WALTON’S CHARACTER
In the evaluation of witness testimony, the credibility of the witness must

also be evaluated.
On May 5, 1971, Travis Walton and Charles Rogers pleaded guilty to first
degree burglary and forgery charges. (Charles Rogers is a younger brother of
Michael Rogers, who was also involved in the UFO incident.) This information
was revealed by Travis Walton himself during a preliminary discussion with the
polygraph examiner, Mr. McCarthy, and confirmed by state authorities.
The young men agreed to make restitution of the funds and were placed on a
two-year probation. Arizona law provides that if probation is fulfilled
satisfactorily the party may later return and ask the Court to expunge the
record. Both of the boys retracted their original pleas after the completion of
the probation period.
At the time of the report there is no indication that Walton was continuing
his youthful misbehavior.
PRIOR INTEREST IN UFOS
Interest in UFOs does not prohibit the interested party from having a valid
sighting. However, in a large majority of hoax reports, prior interest is usually
present. It has been reported elsewhere that Walton had little or no prior interest
in the field. Dr. Howard Kandell, one of the two physicians who examined
Walton at APRO’s request was asked if the Waltons had indicated any prior
interest in UFOs. Kandell replied: “They admitted to that freely, that he (Travis)
was a ‘UFO Freak’ so to speak....” He had made remarks that if he ever saw
one, he’d like to go aboard.
Dr. Jean Rosenbaum, a psychiatrist who examined Walton was asked
whether he had mentioned any prior interest in UFOs. He replied, “Everybody
in the family claimed that they had seen them (UFOs) ...Travis has been
preoccupied with this almost all of his life...then he made the comment to his
mother just prior to this incident that if he was ever abducted by a UFO, she
was not to worry because he’d be all right.” Duane Walton has stated that he
and Travis had often discussed the possibility of getting a ride on a UFO.
MOTIVATION OF THE SIX WITNESSES
It has been stated that there was no motivation, other than possible
friendship for the other six witnesses to corroborate Walton’s story if it were
not true. Investigation has revealed a strong financial possible motive for Mike
Rogers and the other five crew members to perpetrate a hoax.
Mike Rogers had submitted a bid in the spring of 1974 to the U.S. Forest
Service for a timber thinning operation of 1,277 acres of land in a National
Forest, located in the Apache-Sitgreaves area. His bid was accepted and was 27
percent under the mid-figure submitted by the other companies. By the
following summer (1975) it clear to Rogers that he had grossly underestimated
the magnitude of the job and could not complete it on time. He applied for an
extension which was granted but he was penalized $1.00 per acre for all work
performed after expiration of the original contract date. The new work
completion date was November 10, 1975. As the new deadline approached, it
became clear that once again, they could not possibly complete the work by
that time and he would have to ask for another extension that would result in
another pay cut. More serious, the Forest Service was withholding 10 percent
of the payments until the job was done. With winter at hand, Rogers could not
finish until the next spring to collect these funds. The alleged UFO incident
gave Rogers a legal basis terminating his money-losing contract on the ground
that his crew would not return to the work site out of fear, allowing Rogers to
collect the withheld funds and pay his crew.
SUMMARY
The reaction of the Travis Walt family when informed that he had be
“zapped” away on a UFO provides valuable measure of whether they hi prior
knowledge of a planned hoax. they believed that the incident actually took
place, they would realize that they might never see Travis again. Troopers from
the Navajo County Sheriff’s Department assembled late on the night of
November 5th, and returned the alleged site to search for Travis. It was not
until several hours after midnight on Nov. 6th that the group proceeded to
inform Travis’ mother that her son could not be found.
One member of the troopers informed Mr. Klass that when he explained the
horrible fate of her son, she simply replied, “I’m not surprised.”
Mrs. Kellet suggested to the law enforcement officials that the search be
abandoned, saying, “I just don’t think there’s any use of looking any further...I
don’t think he’s on this earth.” Travis’ brother, Duane, stated that he would stay
on the site and wait because they always return their victims to the same spot.
At no time during the entire episode did the family or crew members show
or express any concern for his well being. Mr. Klass stated that, “One possible
explanation for the reaction of Rogers and the members of his family is that
they knew the incident was a hoax and that Travis was safe in a terrestrial
hideout, rather than aboard an extraterrestrial spacecraft that might be taking
him to a distant world from which he might never return.”
On November 8, while Travis was ““still missing,” Duane said he was not at
all concerned for his brother’s safety. Duane said he regretted that “I haven’t
been able to experience the same thing.”
In any scientific investigation, all data must be considered. Any organization
or corporation reporting on investigations has the responsibility to disclose all
facts to its readers...not just the information which supports a preconceived
position.
When the strengths and weaknesses of the Walton Case are evaluated, the
indications are that a hoax has been perpetrated.
—NICAP
References
The APRO Bulletin (November 1975).
The APRO Bulletin (December 1975).
The APRO Bulletin (February 1976).
The APRO Bulletin (March 1976).
The APRO Bulletin (July 1976).
The APRO Bulletin (August 1976).
Barry, Bill. Ultimate Encounter (Pocket Books, 1978). Klass, Philip J. UFOs: The Public Deceived
(Prometheus Books, 1983).
_____. UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game (Prometheus Books, 1988).
UFO Investigator (June 1976).
Walton, Travis. The Walton Experience (Berkley, 1978).
_____. Fire in the Sky (Marlowe & Co., 1996).
wanderer This poetic term, used by George Hunt Williamson and other UFO
contactees in the 1950s, describes a process of inter-dimensional, inter-
planetary soul transfer. In this process, a higher-dimensional ET soul incarnates
in the normal way (e.g., as a baby), and agrees to forget their own memory of
ET identity and purpose, to aid the evolution of humanity and the planet. This
process of cosmic soul-wandering has occurred since the beginning of human
experience on Earth and is common throughout the Universe, and expresses of
the basic Law of Service in which elder souls freely go to serve worlds in need.
The Law of Service is said to be the primary motivation for the majority of
UFO visitation occurring on Earth today.
—SCOTT MANDELKER
War of the Worlds A classic science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds by
H. G. Wells, is about an invasion from Mars. It first appeared in serial form in
Cosmopolitan magazine during the summer of 1897. The first edition of the
book was published by William Heinemann of London in 1898, and of course
has been reprinted many times.
Alvin Correa’s classic illustration of a Martian emerging from its spacecraft-cylinder in H.G. Wells’
War of the Worlds.
The concept of an invasion from space as a purgative horror owes much to

this early literary effort, which has had considerable impact on later fictional
writing, to say nothing of its obvious influence on speculations about the
possible motives behind UFO activity.
The talented Orson Welles produced a realistic radio dramatization of the
story in October 1938, causing a panic in the Eastern United States. The
stampede triggered by the broadcast is often referred to by students of the UFO
problem as an example of potential havoc that could be generated by the
sudden release of startling UFO information, or by a mass landing of alien
craft.
The novel inspired an American movie in 1953 which won an Academy
Award for special effects. The UFO flap in France in 1954, which was notable
for many “little men” reports, may have been encouraged by the George Pal
production, which at that time was enjoying a successful run in French theaters.
The Wellsian “UFOs are hostile” theory has been best developed by UFO
authors Brad Steiger, Harold T. Wilkins, Coral E. Lorenzen, and Donald E.
Keyhoe. The problem of an unprepared public is a theme that pervades many
UFO books and articles, especially by Keyhoe, who served for many years as
director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
(NICAP), thus providing a stimulus to the policy of that organization.
—LOREN E. GROSS
POSTSCRIPT: The original magazine serialization and resulting novel by H.G.

Wells introduced the idea of aliens having big heads and degenerated bodies due
to the future evolution of a body shaped by civilization. It was taken up with
enthusiasm by science fiction (SF) writers in the pulp era and came forward into
our time via comics and SF film culture.
Wells mentions the influence of the astronomer Schiaparelli explicitly in his
1898 novel and no doubt was influenced by Percival Lowell as well. Lowell
had introduced the idea of Mars as a dying planet inhabited by technologically
advanced beings.
Wells also described the Martian space vehicles as “huge cylinders,” a
description suggestive of later flying saucers and cigar-shaped UFOs. How he
visualized the beings is captured in the words of the protagonist of Wells’s
novel: “A big grayish rounded bulk, the size perhaps of a bear, was rising
slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it
glistened like wet leather. Two large dark-colored eyes were regarding me
steadfastly.” A few pages later, Wells again emphasizes the eyes: “Those who
have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its
appearance...above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes....” One
could forget for a moment he is reading Wells and could easily imagine hearing
the voice of Barney Hill.
Here we have the gray color, large dark-colored eyes, and leathery skin as
described in later years by many people who claimed to be abducted by UFO-
aliens. By the time the George Pal movie was released in 1954, we have a
modified version of spindly bodies with large heads, large eyes, and even hands
with sucker-tipped fingers, as described in later abduction accounts.
—MARTIN S. KOTTMEYER & RONALD D. STORY
Ware, Donald M. (b. 1935). Donald Ware has studied UFOs since he saw
seven UFOs (which he believes were alien vehicles) over Washington, DC on
July 26, 1952.
He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University in
1957 and an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the Air Force Institute of
Technology in 1970. After serving his country as a fighter pilot, staff scientist,
test manager, and teacher, he retired from the Air Force in 1983.
Ware has studied birds around the world, and had three articles published in
scientific journals. He served as State Director and Eastern Regional Director
for MUFON, and he is a Director of the International UFO Congress. Ware
says that his search for truth has led to physical, mental, and spiritual
interactions with the larger reality represented by the alien presence.
662 Fairway Ave.

Address: Ft. Walton Beach, FL 32547
U.S.A.
POSITION STATEMENT: Some UFOs are vehicles controlled by a more

advanced intelligence. They originally came from Zeta Reticuli, the Pleiades,
Tau Ceti, Sirius, Arcturus, Andromeda, and perhaps other places. Some UFOs
are vehicles made in secret facilities on this planet by humans, with assistance
from one or more alien species. I suspect that some of the vehicles made here
have the capability of reaching the Moon or Mars, using advanced propulsion
systems that are restricted from use by the general society until all national
leaders choose peace. At least one system reduces the effect of gravity.
We are joining the Galactic Society, one person at a time, as our
consciousness evolves toward service-to-others through free-will choices. Then
our souls enter our bodies for a new purpose: to develop unconditional love of
others. We are getting new genetically-engineered bodies: Homo sapiens
alterios that may be among us and Homo alterios spacialis that must be
separated from the general society until the lesser evolved souls are ready to
accept them.
Donald Ware
Perhaps a billion people are ready for open contact, many of whom are now
contacted in their secret night life. Others who have not yet accepted humans of
different races or religions would have serious ego problems. The main criteria
for determining rules of engagement seems to involve our state of spiritual
evolution, and only God knows when we are all ready for open contact.
Don Ware’s position statement is continued below in an essay (published
here for the fist time in book form) that captures the essence of a viewpoint that
is widely held in UFOlogy today.
IS MY WORLD DIFFERENT
THAN YOURS?
Each of us lives in a world defined by our experiences; by our actions and

reactions; by who we meet, what we read, and what we watch on TV, film, and
the stage. We each have the ability to change our world by our thoughts and our
actions. Many people apparently do not realize this is true. Their reactions to
the world are based on fear, and they don’t experience the love they deserve.
My world is a world in the midst of a transformation. My world is a world
full of beauty that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted, and felt
emotionally. I have not felt the emotions of fear or anger since I learned to
perceive the universe from the perspective of my soul, rather than as Donald
Ware. My physical body only has five senses, so where did that sixth sense of
emotion come from? I think it came from my emotional body, an energy body
that occupies the same general space as my physical body. I also think I have a
mental body and a spiritual body. All three of my energy bodies are part of the
soul that will continue to exist after my physical body ceases to function.
My mental body contains the knowledge of all of my past experience,
whether in this life or a previous one. I think my brain can be likened to a
computer. The mental body then becomes the software. The brain is a processor
for both new information and information stored in my mental body. The
storage process is probably based on holographic principles as described in
Michael Talbot’s 1991 book, The Holographic Universe. In our waking state of
consciousness we don’t usually have the access codes for past life experience.
This information is normally trapped behind the veils between our conscious,
subconscious, and unconscious mind. However, if we choose to do so, we can
find methods to pierce those veils. When we pierce the veil to our unconscious
mind we gain access to a modem that can connect us to universal
consciousness.
My spiritual body is part of the great spirit that pervades all that is. Some
people call that great spirit God. Some define it as Love and Light. This
pervasive spirit has become part of my world. It is in each of us whether our
choices are mostly unselfish or selfish. Some form of this spirit is in the
animals and the trees and even in the planet. I have been taught to believe this
spirit is eternal.
Everything in the universe evolves, whether it be a galaxy, a solar system, a
planet, or a person. When we do harm to any part of the universe we adversely
affect the evolution of the universe. When we pollute the water, kill the
animals, cut the trees, and fill our lungs with smoke we do harm to God.
The present transformation of the planet is a major step in the evolution of
the solar system. The reason that the spirit is in our physical bodies on this
planet is changing. Throughout recorded history we have been here to make
choices. These choices tend to polarize the soul, our energy bodies, toward
service to others or service to self. I have been taught that on this planet many
souls are now sufficiently polarized through free-will choices to be ready to
graduate to the next level in their evolution. They are ready to get on with the
task of developing unconditional love. This planet is evolving to become a
place where people develop unconditional love of others. Billions of spiritual
beings, our guides, are here to assist. This transformation marks the end of the
human experience as we have known it, and it marks the beginning of a more
loving and peaceful experience.
Not only is our planet being transformed, but our physical bodies are being
genetically altered. Evidence from my UFO research indicates that some of our
souls will reincarnate into a body that has a larger brain and greater telepathic
ability. Descriptions from several of my friends who have met their hybrid
offspring on alien vehicles include a head with larger eyes and perhaps a 2000-
cc brain. My friends who have learned to communicate telepathically say the
new bodies have greater telepathic ability. We are soon to join a Galactic
Society, and telepathy is the normal means of communication among the many
intelligent species that interact with each other.
UFO researchers who specialize in people’s on-board experiences say that
the number of such experiencers is in the millions, perhaps 10 million just in
the U.S.A. Most seem to have multiple hybrid off-spring. We are told that these
hybrid physical bodies, compatible with expanded consciousness, house the
souls of both their human and their Zeta Reticulan relatives. They also seem to
be compatible with this biosphere as evidenced by many children’s circles,
where hybrid children play in back yards with human children. I wonder when
they will be allowed to live on the surface of this planet with adults in their
awake state of consciousness.
I have high hopes for our future, although I do recognize that the great
changes I see occurring involve great stress. These rapid changes also provide
great opportunity for meaningful choices and great opportunity to express
unconditional love. I see both human and ET influence to encourage all
national leaders to choose peace. This is a prerequisite for establishing a
demilitarized world. I see courageous national and world leaders working to
safely eliminate nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. I see
people with great influence working to help us overcome the destructive habits
to which our society has become addicted. I see new thought entering the
churches, holistic medicine entering the mainstream, and a more efficient and
healthy diet being chosen by many.
More people are recognizing that a growth-driven economy with ever-
increasing material wealth is not a sustainable path to happiness. In order to
avoid a worldwide environmental crisis we should stop taking all we can get
from mother nature and leaving the excess profit to our children. We should
adopt the sustainable mode of living of the indigenous peoples who take only
what they need from mother nature and leave the rest.
As we acquire the consciousness necessary to join the galactic society, we
need representatives elected by all mankind. I think we need world leaders who
can help us realize we are all members of one planet. With this broader
perspective we can devote more energy to the evolution of our souls, and we
can avoid the strife and inefficiency that accompany extreme nationalism and
materialism.
—DONALD M. WARE
Washington National radar-visual sightings This extraordinary series of

events occurred in the vicinity of Washington, D.C., on July 19-20, July 23,
July 26-27, July 28, and July 29, 1952. In the midst of a summer heat wave
(tied in later with an attempt to explain the Washington sightings and radar
returns as being caused by temperature inversions), radar controllers, ground
observers, and pilots and crews of both civilian airliners and military jet
fighters experienced a “mini-invasion” of UFOs, which created headlines
around the world.
The ten-day episode began shortly after midnight on July 19-20, as the Civil
Aeronautics Agency’s Air Route Traffic Control (ARTCC) radar operators at
Washington National Airport picked up seven unknown targets on their screens
(the first at 11:40 P.M., July 19), which appeared to be in the vicinity of
Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, fifteen miles south-southwest of
Washington National. The targets appeared to be traveling between 100 and
130 miles per hour, although their motion was described as “completely radical
compared to those of ordinary aircraft.” They would hover in one position at
times and also dart up and down. When two of the “objects” suddenly streaked
off the screen, air traffic controller Edward Nugent requested his supervisor,
senior controller Harry G. Barnes, to look at the scope. After one look, Barnes
in turn called over two more experienced controllers, Jim Copeland and Jim
Ritchey, who verified the observations. Technicians were also called in to check
the equipment for possible malfunction which was determined not to be the
case, and Barnes then contacted the airport control tower, confirming that the
targets were present on their scopes as well. Andrews radar operators also
picked up strange blips on their scopes, which correlated with those being
tracked by Washington National.
The first visual confirmation came at 3:15 A.M. (July 20) from Capitol
Airlines flight #807, southbound from Washington National. The pilot, “Casey”
Pierman (a seventeen-year veteran with the airline), sighted seven objects,
where radar showed them to be, which he could not identify. The objects,
which were observed for twelve minutes, were described by Captain Pierman
as bright lights. “They were like falling stars without tails,”he said, and two of
them traveled at tremendous speed.
Allegedly a once classified USAF photo showing six UFOs over Washington, D.C., on July 20,
1952. The oblong luminosity (center) is supposed to be the exhaust trail of a jet fighter sent to
intercept the objects.
At times, some of the targets sending back radar returns were invisible to
planes in the area, but a second confirmation came from Capitol-National
Airlines flight #610, inbound from Hemdon, Virginia, reporting a light, which
followed the plane to within four miles of the runway. Ruppelt reports that:
“...ARTCC called for Air Force interceptors to come in and look around. But
they didn’t show, and finally ARTCC called again—then again. Finally, just
about daylight, an F-94 arrived, but by that time the targets were gone. The F-
94 crew searched the area for a few minutes but they couldn’t find anything
unusual so they returned to their base.”
On July 26, at about 10:30 P.M., strange blips were again picked up on radar,
and again tracked simultaneously by ARTCC radar, the Washington National
control tower, and the radar station at Andrews AFB. There were four to twelve
targets, moving between 100 and 120 miles per hour, spread out in an arc
around Washington, D.C., from Herndon, Virginia, to Andrews AFB in
Maryland. United Airlines flight #640 confirmed one colorful light visually and
personnel at Andrews reported “three strange lights streaking across the sky.”
After a two-hour delay, two jet interceptors from New Castle Air Force Base,
Delaware, arrived in the area and began a search for the objects. As before,
most of the targets were invisible except on radar, but one pilot did pursue for
two minutes four bright lights, which he could not overtake even at full throttle.
After about twenty minutes, the jets ran low on fuel and returned to base.
On July 29, Major General John A. Samford, Air Force Director of
Intelligence, held a major news conference at the Pentagon. He stated: “There
has been no pattern that reveals anything remotely like purpose or remotely like
consistency that we can in any way associate with any menace to the United
States.” And that “the radar and visual sightings ...were due to mirage effects
created by a double temperature inversion.”
However, all four operators at the CAA Radar Traffic Control Center at
Washington’s National Airport, who tracked the UFOs on those harrowing
nights in July 1952, consistently maintained that they had good, solid returns
from something—not mirage effects with which they were all familiar and
could easily recognize—that had never appeared before or since.
Captain Ruppelt later remarked that: “On each night that there was a
sighting there was a temperature inversion but it was never strong enough to
affect the radar the way in versions normally do. Hardly a night passed in June,
July, and August in 1952 that there wasn’t an inversion in Washington, yet the
slow-moving, ‘solid’ radar targets appeared on only a few nights.
“So the Washington National Airport Sightings are still unknowns.”
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Hall, Richard H., ed. The UFO Evidence (NICAP, 1964).
NICAP, “Washington National radar/visual sightings” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia of UFOs
The New York Times (July 22, 1952).
UFO Investigator (NICAP, July 1972).
Watch The Skies! (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). Curtis Peebles

provides a historical review of the flying saucer myths which evolved since
1947 and have spawned conspiracy theories and dangerous, cultish fanaticism.
He demonstrates how the myth of a Roswell saucer crash emerged and how an
Air Force sergeant created a fictitious MJ-12 government group complete with
faked secret documents to ingratiate himself with a pretty female UFO
researcher.
Watchers, The (Bantam, 1990). Longtime UFO investigator Raymond Fowler

relates in this book how he uncovered his own memories of lifelong abductions
by aliens and odd phenomena afflicting his family stretching back three
generations. A scoop mark he finds on his lower leg, similar to one described
by abductee Betty Andreasson, leaves Fowler convinced “the scar is the result
of a biopsy taken as part of the aliens’ ongoing genetic research within families
of human beings.”
waves (or flaps), UFO Periods of time when reports of UFOs amass at well
above average rates are variously termed “waves” or “flaps.” Both terms
possess connotative prejudgments. Waves suggest a natural semi-rhythmic
phenomenon or the arrival of masses of people, as in the waves of an invasion
or waves of immigration. Captain Edward Ruppelt of Project Blue Book
defined flaps as “a condition or situation, or state of being of a group
characterized by an advanced degree of confusion that has not yet reached
panic proportions” and is thus diagnosing a psychology problem, a crazy time.
(Ruppelt, 1956) The presence of two terms to denote these times of accelerated
UFO reporting behavior reflect the absence of consensus in UFOlogy’s
attempts to understand what is behind the simple arithmetical truth that UFO
numbers change rather than remain constant over time.
It is not immediately obvious why the UFO phenomenon should not be a
more or less constant occurrence over time whether one regards them as real or
illusory. If they were alien transports connected with a survey of the planet or a
study of mankind, the natural expectation would be that their presence should
be methodical and unceasing. If they were accidents of circumstance or
cognitive error, one would expect their occurrences to be fairly stable across
time in a manner similar to the way traffic accidents remain numerically stable
from year to year without showing periods of several-fold increases.
THE FIRST THEORY

The earliest forms of the Reconnaissance Theory of flying saucers only had
to account for the 1947 wave of sightings. Given the extraordinary
development of the atomic bomb a couple years earlier, it was somewhat
natural to wonder if the equally new phenomenon of flying saucers was
somehow connected. The idea was taken seriously in government intelligence
circles; at least seriously enough to set up a UFO reporting net in the region of
the Eniwetok bomb test. It failed to turn up anything. (Gross, 1986) Donald
Keyhoe was a prominent spokesman for this theory and expanded on it with
attempts to offer additional evidence in support of it. He observes there had
been “a steadily increasing survey after our atomic bomb explosions in New
Mexico, Japan, Bikini, and Eniwetok,” and a second burst of activity after
explosions in Soviet Russia. Attention was focused on the U.S. since it was
“the present leader in atomic weapons.” (Keyhoe, 1950)
These observations however do not bear scrutiny. The June-July 1947 wave
did not coincide with any bomb test. The first Soviet A-bomb was exploded on
August 29, 1949 and was revealed to the world three weeks later. Yet UFO
numbers are seen declining consistently from July to October 1949 and the only
thing resembling a surge does not take place until March 1950. The
concentration of UFOs in the U.S. was true for 1947, but 1954 UFO reports
were concentrated in France and still later waves were focused in Spain and
Latin America; places that have never been in the forefront of nuclear
developments. In February 1951 Keyhoe predicted there would be an upswing
in UFO activity in the spring of 1951 due to scheduled atomic bomb tests near
Las Vegas, Nevada. UFO historian Loren Gross has already pointed out the
period happened to be the quietest on record. (Gross, 1983) The belief that the
first waves of UFOs involved the monitoring of atomic bomb developments
persists to the present day; as one can see the Raymond Fowler’s book The
Watchers (1990) But it rests on no reasoned argument and can point to no
successes, either in prediction or interpreting any of the waves since 1947.
THE MARTIAN HYPOTHESIS
Around 1952 a new interpretation of waves arose based on the recognition

that waves seemed to peak around the time that Mars came closest to the Earth.
Researchers in that era favored Mars as the likeliest abode of life, and it made
some sense that travelers might time their arrivals to conserve fuel. Numerous
predictions were offered. In January 1952, Lonzo Dove predicted the arrival of
a saucer armada on April 15-16 of that year. Dove claimed success with a
th
photograph of a huge circular cloud 30 miles across that he took on April 16 .
(Dove, 1953)
The UFO numbers in the Blue Book files, however, tell a different story.
th th
There were only three UFO reports for the 15 , four for the 16 , and six on the
th
17 . Though this is trivially better than the numbers in March, it is pretty small
for an armada and not very impressive placed against July’s numbers, which
ran in the dozens daily. Edgar Jarrold of the Australian Flying Saucer Bureau
predicted 1954 and 1956 would be exceptionally heavy and 1953 and 1955
would be fairly light. He called it right for the light periods, but 1954 was
exceptionally heavy only in France, and 1956 saw nothing of consequence.
(Jarrold, 1953)
Aimé Michel first thought the Martian hypothesis was confirmed when a
prediction he made for a wave in the late summer of 1954 came true. In his
second effort he predicted a wave for eastern Europe or the Middle East in
October or November 1956. When this was “double refuted,” he endorsed the
verdict of the Civilian Saucer Intelligence that the Mars correlation failed.
(Michel, 1958) Harry Lord of the Tynesdale UFO Society issued a forecast in
1963 utilizing the Mars theory. He predicted flaps for late ’62 early ’63 (No),
early ’65 (No), late ’67 (Yes), late ’69 (No way!) and a large peak in late ’72
(No). (Lord, 1963).
Jacques Vallée further discredited the theory by pointing out that pre-1947
waves did not conform to the Mars cycle. The space probes to Mars pitched
additional dirt on the grave when showed it to be quite lifeless. Richard Hall
offered a variant that proposed that flaps correlated with Venus, but it was
DOA.
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
A number of attempts to predict UFO waves eschew any theoretical

justification and simply base themselves on patterns in the data that suggest
cyclicity. Keyhoe tried this in his historic article for True. Noting peaks of
saucer activity in July 1947 and July 1948, he predicted it would peak again in
July 1950. Activity peaked in March that year. (Girard, 1989) In December
1971 NICAP reported on the discovery of a five-year cycle and predicted there
would a flap in 1972. That year had 152 reports compared to 137 in 1971 and
they proclaimed success in bold headlines proclaiming “1972 Upholds Five-
Year UFO Cycle.” By November 1973, however, NICAP was reminded what a
true flap is all about: “First Flap in Six Years Resurrects UFOs as National
Controversy.”
Jenny Randles spoke of a 21-month cycle in the Pennine area of Great
Britain and confidently predicted May/June 1984 would prove to be rather
interesting. By her own later account, 1984 saw only 23 UFO cases and the best
clustering happened around April 15 and 25. She found these cases rather
interesting, while admitting they may be associated with military exercises.
Writing in 1986 she acclaims her prediction came true: “I don’t know how.”
(Randles, 1983, 1986)
The most famous cycle theory was a 61-month pattern offered by David
Saunders. He claims it led him to predict in advance a 1972 wave in South
Africa. (Saunders, 1976) Allan Hendry characterized the South African reports
as a minor flurry and not a wave and also questioned the propriety of using
Bloecher’s 1947 data in Saunders’ since it was a special delimited study. When
removed from consideration, the remaining data show the baseline collection of
1947 reports in Blue Book’s files had only a small swell of numbers
inconsonant with a major flap. (Hendry, 1976) There have been a number of
efforts to rehabilitate Saunders’ work, but the absence of waves in January 1983
and February 1988 spelled an end to its believability. (Partain, 1985) With such
failures, hope has faded for a simple mathematical model of mass UFO
appearances.
BEHAVIORIST NOTIONS
Jacques Vallée looked at the pattern of UFO flaps and theorized it was
schedule of reinforcement like that used by behaviorists to instill irreversible
behavior. The pattern of periodicity and unpredictability would help us learn
new concepts. This control system allegedly also explains the absence of
contact and why the phenomenon misleads us. That would preclude genuine
learning. (Vallée, 1975)
This theory is amazingly perverse at even the simplest level. Within
behaviorist theory, to be reinforcing, a stimulus must be of a positive,
rewarding character. (Ruch and Zimbardo. 1971) It must induce pleasure
instead of pain. The overwhelming majority of UFO cases involve fear. (Vallée,
1977; Swiatek-Hudej, 1981; Moravec, 1987) UFO flaps are usually times of
anxiety, confusion, and near-hysteria. During the 1973 wave, mothers kept their
children from going to school for fear they might be kidnapped. Clearly,
learning in any form is unlikely in such an emotional atmosphere.
The suggestion, usually made in passing, that flaps are a way of
desensitizing humanity to their presence, of getting us used to them perhaps in
preparation for The Landing, at least gets the emotional valences of UFO
experiences right. (Hall, 1988) The manner of presentation, however, is wrong.
Desensitization is best accomplished by gradual increases in the intensity of the
aversive stimuli. (Skinner, 1974) Appearing in sudden waves and withdrawing
for long intervals only favors anxiety and acute fright. (Smelser, 1963)
TOURIST THEORY
A more promising line of speculation in the extraterrestrial mode exists in

DeLillo and Marx’s Tourist Theory of UFOs. They offer as a model the whims
of earthly tourism. This year we go Europe; next year the fares to South
America look inviting. Maybe a few will brave Africa for a safari in between.
Unsystematic but curious gatherings might follow news of Earth-Zoo personnel
capturing an unusual specimen of wild humanity. Concerted campaigns by this
or that agency competing for business might also yield an occasional bustle of
traffic. (Marx and DeLillo, 1979) This is quite ingenious and would seem to be
virtually untestable and immune to argument with respect to the numbers.
There are, however, broader considerations that work against the theory. The
most interesting things in a foreign culture tend to be located in urban settings:
their museums, architecture, shops, churches, and shrines. UFO experiences
tend to be in rural settings and the aliens don’t debark for tour busses. Souvenir
hunting is rarely seen. There’s only one or two cases of an alien with a camera.
Gillespie and Prytz (1984) offer a cruder variation in their thoughts about
UFO waves. “Flaps stick out like sore thumbs, and can be explained readily by
External Intelligence for similar reasons that the Sydney Cricket Ground
receives a “flap” of Sydney-siders on Rugby Grand Final Day—it is a unique
place for a certain people at a unique time!” So why were UFOs drawn to Earth
and the United States in June/July 1947, July/August 1952, November 1957,
August 1965, March/April 1966, and so forth? What made these times uniquely
interesting for the aliens? Gillespie and Prytz don’t seem ready to say. Instead
they complain that those who advocate the idea UFO phenomena are internally-
generated haven’t explained why these are unique times either “probably
because it is in the ‘too hard’ basket.”
Difficulty is not disproof. The necessity of a psychological and sociological
approach is mandated by the fact that nine out of ten UFO reports involve
misinterpreted stimuli. This percentage does not alter significantly during flaps
or periods of calm. (Ballester-Olmos, 1987) UFOs never outnumber IFO
reports in any period. Take away all the unsolved cases, and the IFOs still
display the large changes present in the total report population. If
extraterrestrial craft are causing flaps, you still need an explanation for why one
true report spawns nine false ones. Copycat behavior would be the first
possibility, yet IFO cases do not generally seem to be in the proximity of
unsolved cases during major flaps. This is particularly troubling in the 1965
wave that seemed to lack national coverage of a major case off which a rash of
copycats could work.
SILLY SEASONS
Sociological explanations of UFO flaps can be divided into two general

categories, which for convenience can be termed ‘silly season theories’ and
‘crisis theories.’ Silly season theories build on the premise that news media are
a sufficient cause of flaps. The spread of news causes the spread of copycat
behavior. The example of the Forkenbrook experiment forms the model of
these theories. This hoax for a sociology class demonstrated how a false report
could generate so much excitement in a locale that it spawned reports in several
neighboring communities, including one from a man who said he had seen the
UFO for some two weeks and knew it was going to land. (Klass, 1974)
There is no denying this model has application in certain local flaps. The
Socorro case of April 24, 1964 spawned misidentifications of things like
aircraft, birds, and a fire in a dump in nearby locales. Yet the Socorro case
allegedly got national attention. Why didn’t it spawn a nationwide wave of
reports? Why didn’t the Mantell crash spawn a nationwide flap? Why didn’t the
Val Johnson case or the Travis Walton (Snowflake, Arizona) case spawn
nationwide reactions? These questions are relevant since some silly season
theorists put great weight on the assumed effects of single cases that get wide
coverage. The Air Force cited the Levelland Whatnik as the primary cause of
the November 1957 wave. (Strentz, 1982) This is plausible if one regards the
slowly elevating numbers of mid and late October as not a true beginning of the
flap, but a more or less irrelevant flurry that would have been disregarded if the
post-Levelland spike had not appeared.
Herbert Hackett indicates the week of the 1947 flap was “a slow week from
an editor’s viewpoint” and he felt the newspapers milked the story by
continually repeating the Kenneth Arnold flying saucer story with different
experts consulted for their opinions. Hackett (1948) regarded Air Force denials
as a paradoxical reinforcement of the concept. He gives a tally of the amount of
space given to the story in the Los Angeles times each day, presumably to offer
some measure of the amount of reinforcement they gave. It is curious to note
that if one juxtaposes Hackett’s tally to a tally of UFO report numbers from the
Los Angeles area the effect of media is not compelling. One half of the reports
th
occur before the story ever reaches Page One, and by July 10 there are no
UFOs reported, even though it was still on the front page the day before.
(Gross, 1976) This finding parallels remarks by John Keel (1969/89) and
Richard Hall (1988) that media coverage often seems to lag behind the increase
in UFO numbers rather than precede it.
The reason for this can be discovered in Herbert Strentz’s analysis of UFO
journalism. Strentz posits the creating a flap is a “lowering of barriers” that
newsmen set up before they will put a UFO report in their paper. Strentz is not
clear what creates that drop in standards. But data in questionnaires he gathered
provide a rather clear answer. The major reason given for reporting UFOs is an
increase in the number of UFO reports! Coverage is obviously going to lag
events and not initiate them if this is true. (Strentz, 1982)
The relevance of slow news days to lowering barriers is hard to sustain upon
critical reflection. Kenneth Arnold’s report of a new craft travelling at 1200
miles per hour was a sensation for its time and would have merited coverage in
any period regardless of its doubtful character and lack of corroboration. Flaps
have happened in conjunction with major news events like the Sputnik furor in
1957. Philip Klass (1974) has suggested the 1973 wave was, in part, a reaction
to a late-summer doldrums following the sordid disclosures of the Watergate
affair. The UFO reports were printed to lighten things up for a nation weary of
the big news that was dominating the front page. What is troublesome in this
characterization of the period is that the 1973 reached its peak simultaneously
with the Saturday night Massacre which unleashed a flood of negative
sentiment, described by others as a fevered rage that swept the nation. (Lukas,
1976)
Klass devotes a chapter of UFOs Explained (1974) to an extended tracing of
the effects of media on UFO numbers. His reconstruction is impressive and
seductive, but suffers from many difficulties when subjected to close scrutiny.
A modest surge of reports in 1950 is tied to the publication of Donald Keyhoe’s
book The Flying Saucers Are Real, but nothing is said of the article in True
magazine that spawned it. This was one of the most widely discussed articles of
its time. Prominent newsmen like Walter Winchell and Frank Edwards did
items on it. The Associated Press carried quotes from it. (Gross, 1983) A look
at the daily UFO numbers for late December 1949 and January 1950 are
astonishing for their total lack of a reaction.
Klass observes that UFO reports skyrocketed the same month that Life
featured a major story titled “Have We Visitors from Outer Space?” More
articles in Look and Life were published in June 1952 and yielded a ten-fold
increase for that month. Years earlier, Blue Book investigators looked at the
daily tallies, however, and were not convinced there was relationship. A brief
increase was noted after the April 4 release of Life, but numbers seemed
basically the same before as after. (Jacobs, 1975) The tally dropped to zero on
th
the 8 and the bulk of the reports pop up two weeks after the article. The June
17, 1952, Look article was a debunking piece by Donald Menzel who wrote off
the phenomenon as a bunch of mirages. Shouldn’t this have decreased
numbers?
Klass skips lightly over the 1957 wave and ignores the July/August 1965
wave entirely because the media did not show much interest in UFOs until the
swamp gas flap of 1966. This flap is not tackled either, but it set in motion
Congressional action and led to six books being published in 1966 and ten
books in 1967. The Invaders TV series also appears in January 1967. This
increased media attention is held to account for a high total of 937 UFO reports
in 1967. What is left unsaid is that this represents a decrease from the 1966
total of 1060 reports. Peak media coverage once again lags behind peak UFO
numbers.
Hans van Kampen offers a subtle variant of the silly season theory in a 1978
article that relates the story of people seeing a panda that the media said had
wandered out of zoo. Unbeknownst to everyone, the panda was found dead just
as the story went out. Van Kampen felt this flap of panda sightings indicated
that human curiosity and sympathetic sharing of feelings was involved. (van
Kampen, 1979) Do such factors underlie UFO flaps?
Curiosity about UFOs fortunately has a way of being measured. For a period
in 1965 and 1966 there exists a tally of letters to the Pentagon by people
making queries about UFOs. Often they are youngsters writing public school
essays. (Lear, 1966) Overlap this tally of queries on a chart of UFO numbers
and one quickly sees they do not match to a significant degree. Interestingly the
queries do peak the same month that Life, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and
World Report did stories on the swamp gas debacle, but UFO numbers were
already falling. The factor of sympathetic feelings is potentially correct, but not
as easy to test or verify. Given the failure of so many seemingly common sense
notions about UFOs, however, it is perhaps best to suspend judgement about
that factor.
Menzel (1963) has suggested the 1952 wave was nurtured in part by the
movie The Day the Earth Stood Still playing in theaters all spring. He points
out that the spaceship in the movie reappeared in many reports during the wave.
The movie’s initial release actually took place in September 1951. UFO
numbers from August to November run 18-16-24-16, which minimally proves
any reaction was neither immediate nor sharply forceful. It is unsurprising in
this context that a prediction that Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the
Third Kind would spawn a major flap failed. (Klass, 1977; Hendry, n.d.) A
chart of monthly report totals perversely shows a lull throughout the period it
was generating major box-office figures. When it leaves the theaters, the
numbers start upward in a manner that begs the suggestion the movie somehow
suppressed UFO reporting. (Hendry, 1981) It is relevant to add that none of the
major UFO flaps coincide with the release of major films of alien invasion
genre. This may not forbid the possibility that lesser effects on UFO numbers
exist. A look at UFO numbers before and after the release of twenty popular
alien invasion films turns up minor increases for fourteen of them. Even if the
effect is real, we can still doubt whether this is due to enhanced interest in or
attention to aliens, or if the malevolence of movie aliens adds a darker tone to
the UFO mythos and increases numbers by increasing fear. (Lucaniao, 1988)
We can also add that Paul Ferrughelli did a correlation study of Prime-Time
Television events and the frequency of UFO reports in a 36-month period from
1987 to 1989 involving 683 sightings reports. The correlation coefficient
calculated from the data was +.086, which was effectively indistinguishable
from no causal relationship whatsoever. (Ferrughelli, 1991)
There is another problem with silly season theory. J. Allen Hynek raised it in
a memoir of the swamp gas debacle. Why was there so much excitement and
hysteria over the incredibly trivial Dexter sightings? The media circus makes
no sense from the perspective of newsworthiness. Strentz’s news judgement
barriers had tumbled in a collective mania of the period. They were clamoring
for an authoritative statement from the Air Force on what amounted to some
faint lights and a glow in a swamp. They posed no danger. There were no aliens
seen. It was less dramatic than dozens of cases seen over the years. Why should
this be? Hynek had not a clue and pleaded for sociologists to take a crack at the
problem. (Hynek, 1976)
It would be an exaggeration to regard silly season theories as refuted by all
the above considerations. It may be a more detailed study or some novel
perspective might yield more convincing results. According to the Condon
report, however, there have other attempts to correlate UFO maxima with
waves of press publicity without compelling evidence of a real association. It is
hard to escape the sense that there is some missing factor or factors.
REACTIONS TO SCIENCE
The problem that presents itself is figuring out which of the myriad
changing aspects of the human environment it is that UFO numbers are
responding to. Is it political climates (liberal vs. conservative, individualism vs.
collectivism, democratic vs. totalitarian)? Is it war and peace? Is it economic
climates? Is it changing styles in the exercise of power? Is it changes in
collective perceptions of powerlessness? Is it a response to fluctuating
religious-secularist fashions of living? Is it a response to different educational
fashions? Are there changes in skepticism and gullibility, cynicism and trust?
Are people more sky-oriented and filled with wanderlust in some times more
than others?
One interesting stab in the dark was John A Rimmer’s guess that for every
scientific advance is an equal and opposite mystical reaction. The ghost rockets
of 1946 and the saucers of 1947 would thus be a reaction to the introduction of
nuclear weapons in 1945. The 1957 Levelland wave would be the obvious
reaction of the introduction of space travel represented by the Sputniks the
same month. Did the other flaps follow major scientific advances? Was there a
reaction associated with the Moonlanding? (Rimmer, 1969) The depressing
answers are no and no, despite the poetry of the idea.
CRISIS THEORIES
One of the venerable mainstays of sociological thought is the concept of

crisis as an agent of social change. There is a sizeable literature devoted to
crisis cults and how stressful events prompt new interpretations of religious
doctrines, visions, and myths. (LaBarre, 1972) Among the axioms of crisis
theory is the proposition that crises create wishes for supernatural solutions.
(Stark and Bainbridge, 1987) UFOs can be regarded as supernatural in the
official sense that they are forces outside of nature that suspend, alter, and
ignore physical forces. Are UFOs a magical reaction to crises? Otto Billig has
offered the most extended argument that they are. His application of crisis
theory to the data of the UFO phenomenon is probably as close to textbook as
can be expected and one cannot deny there are facets to his thesis that work. In
the specific realm of UFO flaps, however, difficulties are clearly evident. In his
usage, the concept of crisis embodies such a wide range of events one is left
wondering why we do not see a steady stream of reports instead of the widely
separated peaks of activity that are actually present. This is vividly exemplified
by Billig’s annotations on a chart of Air Force compiled monthly UFO tallies.
Periods of crisis cover roughly 67 percent of the time interval from 1947 and
1969 by his own illustration. Yet only eight percent of this interval shows
numbers that could be reasonably termed flaps. (Billig, 1982) Even if we regard
crisis not as a primary causal agent, but as a necessary catalytic factor, there is
no way to discount the plausibility that these flaps overlap the 67 percent
regions of crisis simply by chance.
Lloyd de Mause’s psychohistorical investigations of the fantasy-life of
American politics provide a more useful definition of crisis. Utilizing a
protocol called fantasy analysis on a mass of historical documents and news
stories, de Mause charted a regular sequential change of the perception of the
strength and impotence of American leadership. For our purposes we will only
look at one of the recurring stages that is specifically perceived as a phase of
crisis and collapse. It is identified by a proliferation of emotional metaphors
involving fantasies of death and dying. Unnamed poisonous enemies multiply
as the group displaces rage outwards. Apocalyptic and millennial overtones are
generally present. De Mause’s group fantasy definition allows a restriction and
demarcation between crises that are merely annoyances and crises that are felt
with intense emotion. It has the added virtue of having been constructed
independent of any interest in UFOs. There would be no question of crises
being selected in a manner to skew acceptance of the crisis theory. (De Mause,
1982)
Six group fantasy crises occurred between 1952 and 1977, the period that de
Mause limited himself to. They comprise only 18 percent of this 25-year
interval. If all five major national flaps fell into these well-defined bands of
crisis, we would have impressive statistical proof of a true relationship.
Regrettably, only one wave, 1957, occurs during these crises and this is no
better than chance.
It might be that political crisis is the wrong form of crisis to be looking at.
Charles Fair offers a variant restriction of crisis theory that suggests UFO
graphs are gauges of collective anxiety corresponding to alignments of power
during the Cold War. Thus flaps happen at the times of Dulles’ “brinkmanship,”
the opening phases of the space race, and the entanglement in Vietnam. (Fair,
1974) There is one killer problem that stares any potential convert of such crisis
theories in the face. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was the single most
terrifying event in the twentieth century. Fear of nuclear annihilation was
palpable and imminent. If ever an impetus for salvationist fantasy and magical
escape existed, it to be then. We should have seen the biggest UFO flap
imaginable. This not only failed to happen, but UFO numbers actually dropped
during the crisis.
Billig tries to excuse this incongruity in his application by trying to draw a
distinction between crises that focus on specific situations and those that pose a
vague threat, which leaves the individual without adequate defenses. The
distinction sounds phony since every individual without a fallout shelter had no
defense against a nuclear exchange. The wish for aliens to come down and
rescue us naturally seems a logical supernatural solution obliged by the axioms
of crisis theory. Peter Rogerson (1981) alternately proposed the crisis was over
so fast that there was not enough time for a salvationist fantasy to develop. The
1957 wave, however, showed a ten-fold increase in the matter of three days.
And, to repeat, the numbers actually went down during the crisis. Surely some
kind of increase should have been registered. Such excuses just don’t wash to
anyone who lived through this collective staredown with death.
Crisis theory probably does not work here because the salvationist impulse
does not form the core of the dominant rumor complex about UFOs. While the
impulse is certainly present in the contactee complex of people like George
Adamski and George Hunt Williamson, this is distinct from the beliefs of
people like Donald Keyhoe and Coral Lorenzen who saw UFOs as spycraft and
potential invaders. (Rogerson, 1978/79) It is also distinct from those who felt
saucers were secret weapons: the true dominant belief of the fifties and sixties
in the general public. Most cases speak not of escaping Earth and all its sorrows
(the John Lennon UFO is a well-known but nearly unique exception to the
rule), but express fears of many varieties from being spied upon, being
captured, being chased, being contaminated, and being run into.
MASS HYSTERIA
The suggestion that flaps are a form of collective hysteria seems initially
more promising as a way to account for the fears seen in UFO experiences.
Mark Rhine in the Condon report and Robert Hall point to certain episodes of
mass hysteria or hysterical contagion like the June bug epidemic, the Seattle
windshield pitting epidemic, and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, wondering if they
may serve as explanatory models for what is going on with the UFO
phenomenon. Neither takes the idea very far and Hall pointed out several
difficulties in comparing these phenomena, probably the most notable being the
fleeting character of these model epidemics. (Sagan and Taves, 1974) Michael
Swords suggests these models are more properly labeled as anxiety attacks and
adds the point that the people involved do not display psychotic symptoms:
“...they do not add unreal experiences to their beliefs.” He firmly denies
hysteria or mass psychogenic illness makes any contribution to the great mass
of UFO reports and his detailed argument is strongly recommended as a
thorough demolition of this line of inquiry. It further warns us that the etiology
of flaps will not analogous to neuroses, but psychoses. (Swords, 1984)
Allan Hendry’s study of 1158 IFO reports demonstrates conclusively there
are important emotional forces connected to the UFO mythos that compromises
the objectivity of percipients of UFOs. Commonplace stimuli like stars,
balloons, and the like are imaginatively reconstructed with unreal traits like
domes and the saucer shape. Witnesses are totally sincere and most are
eminently articulate even when offering greatly distorted observations. IFO
witnesses are found in skilled trade jobs and with both general and specialized
education. Competency and the ability to reason critically are not the issues.
Emotions and expectations are subverting the perception process. (Hendry,
1979)
PARANOIA THEORY
Many facets of the UFO mythos are identifiably forms of paranoid ideation.
The core belief that aliens are making a reconnaissance of our planet, that, to
borrow a title from the sixties, Flying Saucers are Watching Us, is a collective
variant on the common paranoid delusion of observation, the erroneous
impression that one is being watched by persecuting others. Allied to this is a
large complex of suspicions.
The government knows more than it is telling. It is purposefully misleading
the public. It secretly gathers up all important evidence like photos and crashed
saucers. The saucers may be secret weapons of America, Russia, and even Nazi
scientists. Concerns about invasion, poisoning, irradiation, mind-tampering,
doppelgangers, night-doctors, and sexnappings are seen. Myriad fantasies of
world destruction have been ubiquitous among both UFOlogists and
experiencers.
Norman Cameron guesses the incidence of paranoid reactions in the general
population to be quite high. Transient paranoid misinterpretations may happen
to virtually anyone in the right set of circumstances. (Cameron, 1959) In certain
individuals paranoid ideation becomes fixed and chronic. Even in these
instances, there is no loss of mental competency in most other aspects of their
lives. Indeed they may often perform at superior levels. (Rosen, Fox, and
Gregory, 1972) Paranoia is essentially an intellectual disorder which is
strikingly, meticulously logical after the basic emotional axioms are laid in.
(Fried and Agassi, 1976) The point is that Hendry’s facts about IFO reports are
consistent with either transient or chronic paranoia. This allows one to
speculate on the origins of the waves of misinterpretation generated by the
UFO mythos, for there is no mystery about the origins of paranoiac reactions.
Kenneth Mark Colby has critically reviewed the formulations offered by
several researchers for the origin of paranoia and convincingly concluded that
only shame and humiliation adequately explained the range of known
precipitants of paranoia. Injuries to the ego in such forms as personal slights,
job failures, false arrests, accidents, deformities, and sexual defeat exemplify
the varied events seen at the beginning of paranoid psychoses. (Colby, n.d.)
Underscoring the primacy of personal pride over personal danger is fact that
paranoia is more often associated with people experiencing thwarted ambitions
than with people holding few expectations in a hazardous environment.
(Meissner, 1978) If flaps are being governed by the dynamics of paranoia, we
should be asking if they are being generated by episodes of collective shame.
APPLICATION
In the case of the major UFO flaps in America, such a question yields good
answers. The 1947 wave was obviously triggered by the phrase flying saucer
entering the language and the presumption that they represented a superweapon
closely analogous to the atomic bomb developed in supersecrecy by the
Manhattan Project a couple years earlier. This fed into a hysterical anti-
th
communism that was spawned earlier in 1947, specifically March 12 . On that
date Truman addressed a joint session of Congress and spoke in sweeping,
apocalyptic terms of communism as an insidious world menace. Those who
loved freedom would have to struggle with it at all times and all fronts. Truman
quickly set up a federal loyalty review program. One aim of this speech was to
garner military aid to support a Greek regime in the throes of a civil war by
scaring the hell out of the American people. The aid was granted, but it
succeeded too well in scaring people. Norman Thomas was making a trip
through California that spring and was amazed at how quickly “hysterical anti-
communism swept the state.” Historians David Caute and Athan Theoharis
confirm this pervasive fear of communism quickly gripped the nation. A poll in
1947 showed 66 percent of Americans believed the Soviet Union was
“aggressive” compared to 38 percent in 1945. (Boyer, 1994) One of the earliest
moves by the government in investigating the flying saucer problem included
background checks of those who claimed to have seen saucers to determine if
they had communist ties. They didn’t. The erosion of basic trust by loyalty tests
of Americans could be a key factor in the escalation of paranoia in this period.
The 1952 wave begins with the rising furor of an upcoming steel strike
planned by laborers in the steel industry. In that era, steel was a major force in
the American economy and an integral part of American national identity. The
strike deeply divided the nation because the nation was then fighting a war in
Korea and such an action was perceived as a traitorous threat to the strength of
the nation. President Truman seized the steel industry to keep the mills running.
In due course, however, the courts declared the seizure unconstitutional and the
strike began in earnest.
UFO numbers respond to developments in the steel strike in a convincing
manner. Numbers grew up to the time of the seizure and then fell for a time.
After the courts ruled and the strike proceeded, UFO numbers began upwards
and skyrocket to record proportions, culminating in the frenzy of the
Washington National sightings. Three days after the first Washington National
sighting the strike was settled. Within a week, the numbers begin to collapse,
assisted by an announcement that the D.C. cases were caused by a temperature
inversion.
SPUTNIK
Sputnik was indisputably the central trauma of the fifties generation and a
profound blow to American self-esteem. The U.S. prided itself on being the
most technologically advanced nation on Earth. Yankee ingenuity was a term of
self-endearment. Sputnik called all this into question. The Russians were the
first to orbit a satellite around the Earth and we were not. This event gnawed
away at the American psyche such that millions were funneled into the space
program over the following decade in a race to put a moon on the moon before
the Russians and restore self-confidence in our superiority.
A look at the UFO numbers are puzzling at first glance because the peak
happens after the launch of Sputnik II, a month after Sputnik I. Shouldn’t the
Levelland flap follow the initial Sputnik more closely? A memoir of the period
by NASA clarifies the paradox. The alarm did not materialize immediately.
Planetariums and ham radio operators became more active after the first
announcement, but Newsweek correspondents first found “massive
indifference” and a vague feeling we had entered a new era. After a week, this
bewilderment melted away before a mounting and almost universal furore.
th th
Between October 9 and 15 a lot of blaming was going on in Washington D.C.
and calls went up for improving education. Successful rocket tests between
th rd
October 17 and October 23 offered hope we were catching up, but then on
rd
November 3 Russia announced the launch of a second even more spectacular
Sputnik with a dog on board named Laika. (Green and Lomask, 1970) Add into
this emotional brew news of a UFO incident in which an UFO caused
automobiles to fail and the numbers exploded ten-fold.
th
Numbers dropped off from the 6 onwards probably because of the
whimsical Trasco case, wherein aliens tried to kidnap a guy’s dog, an obvious
spin on Laika. The Schmidt contact may also have been a factor for authorities
quickly proclaimed the man an ex-con. Numbers remain elevated in the ensuing
weeks. There is a temporary sharp decline accompanying the explosion of a
th
Vanguard rocket on December 6 and some see that as point against paranoia
theory. Yet while this was clearly a humiliation for workers on the Vanguard
project and they were treated like they had committed treason, people in
general seemed disappointed and depressed. Paranoia is in part a defense
against depression and does not manifest itself in the depths of mourning.
(Meissner, 1978) It is more usually associated with frenzy and manic thought.
The flap resumed briefly in the days that followed, but by late December it was
essentially over. The launch of Explorer I on January 31, 1958 was a relief, but
UFO numbers were already so low by that date that no further decline was
immediately apparent since there were only one to three reports per day. Even
so, the total for February was 41, down from January’s 61, and potentially
indicative of restored pride.
SIXTIES
The UFO wave of July-August 1965 coincides with two major events that
introduced the nation to two extended nightmares: the Vietnam debacle and the
race riots. The first U.S. ground combat operation began on June 28, 1965.
While the U.S. had been involved in Vietnam with aerial bombing before this
date, the ground combat denoted a new level of development. Unfortunately it
th
quickly turned out that the troops were engaged in a “futile assault.” On July 4 ,
th
Hanoi repulsed overtures for peace. On July 20 U.S. Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara reported the situation in Vietnam was deteriorating. On July
th
28 a troop build-up was announced and draft calls issued. UFO numbers were
virtually flat from January to June, but with July gradual, but erratic increases
th
are unmistakable. A small two-day decline around July 15 coincides with news
of Mariner 4 reaching Mars—a brief moment of technological triumph.
th
The flap reaches a peak on August 4 as the reality of the Draft sinks in, then
drops down quickly for a week when the second blow hits. On August 11th: the
th th
Watts riot. From the 11 to the 16 the Watts suburbs go up in flames when
racial tensions erupted. UFO numbers seem to go up in response for a
th th
secondary peak on the 11 and 12 of August. Beginning on August 18-19 and
in mid-September successful Vietnam operations at Chulai, Da Nang, and
Ankhe are accompanied by declines of UFO numbers and the flap gradually
fizzled out.
The swamp gas flap is significantly smaller than the other flaps we are
considering here, but we can answer Hynek’s question posed earlier. Five days
before Dexter-Hillsdale, on March 15, 1966, a new Watts riot came into the
headlines. UFO numbers that had running flat for weeks amid stories of truces,
peace bids, and talk of the Great society, began to surge in response. Then on
rd
March 23 , two days before Hynek’s press conference, came the first anti-
th
American demonstrations in Hue and DaNang. The flap peaked on March 30
and presumably declined for lack of further race riots or anti-American
demonstrations. News of Saigon riots and further anti-U.S. outbursts on April
th
4 was followed the next day by a secondary peak. An ant-U.S. riot in Hue on
th th
May 26 and the flaming suicide of a religious figure on May 29 were also
accompanied by brief, lesser increases.
Over the months that followed, UFO numbers tended to remain at elevated
levels, but visibly fluctuated in response to developments in Vietnam. During a
period of record casualties in March 1967, UFOs were clearly swarming about.
During the Christmas truce and peace proposals of late December 1966, the
UFOs vanished. A curious proof of the importance of Vietnam War news in
th th
modulating UFO numbers came in June 1967. Between June 5 and 10 ,
Vietnam was completely knocked off the front page by an Arab-Israeli war. For
four days straight Blue Book did not receive a single report! This interesting
fact, we can add, calls into question Thomas Bearden’s linking the 1973 flap
with mid-East War tensions. (Bearden, 1980)
OTHER RESOLUTIONS
Blue Book went out of business at the end of the 1960s and with it ended
any conveniently accessible daily tally of UFO numbers. This precluded
detailed comparison of the 1973 wave with the events of the Watergate crisis.
But we can point out that David Jacobs called mid-October the peak period of
the flap and this roughly corresponds with Vice President Agnew’s resignation
th
on October 10 followed ten days later by the Saturday Night Massacre.
(Jacobs, 1975) It unleashed a flood of negative public sentiment and calls for
impeachment. This was against a leader who less than a year before had been
reelected in a landslide of popular support. (Lukas, 1976)
The ups and downs of national pride also seem to correlate with lesser
swings of UFO numbers. News of poverty in Appalachia, charges that Reds
had infiltrated the State Department, and some of the desegregation conflicts
seem to relate to increases in UFO activity. Conversely when we landed on the
moon, when the Reds were retreating during the Korean war, and when Ike
went on his “Peace Tour” UFO reports vanished.
The drop of UFOs during the Cuban missile crisis, so troubling to crisis
theory, is readily understood when one recommends the salient issue is not fear
and anxiety, but pride. It was the Soviets who backed down from that face-off,
not America. A drop-off in UFO numbers following the Kennedy assassination,
another if lesser conundrum to crisis theory, is fully explicable with the
observation on how mourning and melancholy decreases paranoid ideation.
(Meissner, 1978)
PROBLEMS AND CONFUSIONS

It must be said that efforts to extend the theory forward to events after 1973
have been disappointingly ambiguous. National pride was clearly present with
such events as November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the successful 1989
invasion of Panama, and the victorious Persian Gulf War of February 1992.
Each of these events can be linked to periods of zero activity in data collected
by the National Sighting Research Center. Stretches of zero activity, however,
are so common in this data set that one could fairly dismiss the correlation as
due to chance.
The televangelism sex scandals of the 1980s seemed a rather blatant episode
of collective shame and should have prompted paranoiac reactions among the
faithful. In fact, there is unequivocal evidence that they did in the form of
satanic rumor panics. One swept North and South Carolina on March 14, 1987,
five days before Jimmy Baker finally resigned, and another swept the region of
the Alexandria and Baton Rouge ministries of Jimmy Swaggert on April 1,
1988, the week before he was defrocked for sins he confessed to the prior
February. (Victor, 1990) Inspection of daily UFO tallies does not show a
parallel increase of UFO activity either nationally or in the region of the
ministries. One might be tempted to shrug this off by saying UFOs would be
too secular a way to express paranoia in a religious population, but it gets
worse.
The Watts riots of the 1960s seem clearly linked to a spike in UFO activity,
but when riots struck Miami in mid-January 1989 and in Los Angeles after the
Rodney King verdict near the end of April 1992, no spike in UFO activity was
visible. Post hoc, one can say that only riots in Watts seem linked to UFO
spikes and that other race riots in the sixties generated no response. Perhaps it
was special in some way, but why that should be is not is not immediately
apparent.
The most puzzling development occurred during the Monica Lewinsky
scandal. The emotional highpoint seemed to occur in the wake of the
confession of wrongdoing by the President in the summer of 1998. Angry
discussions of the shame it had brought to the country prompted me to check
the National UFO Reporting Center’s database for activity. The site’s home
page remarked “September has been an incredibly active month for UFO
reports, including mass sightings of blue-green fireballs across the United
States.” The next month a message was posted reading, “A UFO wave
sweeping the country characterized by mass sightings of spheres and fireballs
continued throughout October.” In November, the description is upgraded even
further: “Our report database (updated Nov 21) continues to document an
incredible UFO wave sweeping the country.” This description was retained
through January 1999. Seemingly this was proof positive of the paranoia
theory, but then the number of reports continued increasing well after tempers
calmed down. Numbers slowly mount to a peak in the fall of 1999 and then fall
from December through the start of the new Millennium. (NUFORC, August
2000) Critics wonder if this was really a flap or if there it was some form of
collection artifact of Internet growth—a new link from a popular site bringing
in more people or some such development that just coincidentally started in at
the time of the scandal. The situation is thoroughly confusing.
Another issue that draws comment is the absence of Blue Book era sized
flaps since 1973. Was there some factor that suppressed the creation of flaps
other than pride? This seems plausible in terms of changing perceptions about
the nature of the saucer menace. Where the fifties was dominated by concerns
saucers were secret weapons and the sixties by fears of invasion, the seventies
ushered an era of speculations that UFOs were a charade and perhaps harmless.
The movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind in particular advanced a vision
of aliens as children of light and awe which was a polar opposite to the
paranoid fantasies that dominated the prior decades. Such changes would act to
reduce fears about what unexplained lights portend and subvert the superego—
think parental oversight—aspects of earlier UFOlogy. Obsessions with Roswell
and abduction in later years decreased interest in interpreting aerial puzzles in
favor of talk about conspiracies and dream interpretation.
While this might seem to render the theory immune to further test until such
time as we see a return to enthusiastic belief in reconnaissance and invasion,
further work can yet be done in the area of foreign flaps. Was France’s Great
Martian Panic of 1954 connected to the fall of Dien Bien Phu and the pullout of
troops from the IndoChina war? What caused the Latin American Wave of
1965? What of the British Scareships of 1912-13?
Criticisms of paranoia theory have been few and generally obtuse. It has
been called unfalsifiable, but a pattern of high UFO activity congruent with
events of pride such the Persian Gulf War, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall,
the Moonlanding, the Red retreat of the Korean War, etc. would quickly sink
the theory in the eyes of any theorist. A pair of people wondered about the
absence of Bullard’s 1988 paper on flaps in the discussion. Simply, Bullard did
not advance any theory. His paper boils down to the proposition, “Silly season
theory is wrong, ergo UFOs are real.” But IFOs are real, too, and he offers no
explanation why either changed in frequency when they did. Jerome Clark
singles out the explanation of the 1952 wave as “incredible,” using the phrase
“a hysterical reaction to a steel strike” to describe his understanding of the
theory. In fact, mass hysteria was rejected as an explanation of flaps generally
in the first presentation of the theory. There are no details on why he feels it
doesn’t bear consideration. Philip Klass has termed the theory “simplistic” and
can show anyone that silly season theory has been common among the
skeptical.
That the theory is simplistic is true enough and it is by design. The
possibility of multi-factor approaches giving better insight has not been denied,
but focused argument on a single factor has advantages over tangled
commentaries invoking the interaction of multiple elements. At this stage, some
standard elements may not be relevant and it seems best to test the limits of
applying this new element before bringing back in excuses for the confusion we
have seen in this subject.
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Web sites, UFO/ET-related For all the latest information on UFO and SETI-
related subjects, check out the following sites on the world-wide web:
About UFOs and Aliens
www.ufos.about.com
Above Top Secret

www.abovetopsecret.com
Aliens and the Scalpel

www.alienscalpel.com
The Anomalist
www.anomalist.com
Archaeology , Astronautics and SETI Research Association

www.aas-ra.org
Argonaut-Greywolf William & Lori McDonald

www.alienufoart.com
Art Bell
www.artbell.com
Beyond Roswell
www.beyondroswell.com
The British UFO Research Association

www.bufora.org.uk
Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence

www.cseti.com
Citizens Against UFO Secrecy

www.caus.org

www.csicop.org
The Computer UFO Network

www.cufon.org
The Condon Report

www.ncas.org
Deb’s UFO Research Information Clearinghouse

www.debshome.com
Earth Files
www.earthfiles.com
The Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia Project

www.RonaldStory.com
Filer’s Research Institute

www.filersfiles.com
Fund for UFO Research

www.fufor.org
Peter Gersten
www.caus.org
Malcolm Hathorn
www.uforeality.com
J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies

www.cufos.com
David Icke
www.davidicke.com
Inexplicata
www.inexplicata.com
International UFO Museum and Research Center

www.iufomrc.com
Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

www.kennedyspacecenter.com
Kal Korff
www.kalkorff.com
Ronald Story
www.RonaldStory.com
Mothership
www.ufomind.com
Mutual UFO Network

www.mufon.com
NASA Headquarters
www.hg.nasa.gov
NASA Home Page

www.nasa.gov
National UFO Reporting Center

www.ufocenter.com
Nebula
www.parascope.com
NOVA on UFOs and Abductions

www.pbs.org/wgbh
PEER
www.peer-mack.org
Planetary Society
www.planetary.org
Project Blue Book FBI Freedom of Information Act

www.foia.fbi.gov/bluebook
Project 1947
www.Project1947.com
Jeff Rense
www.sightings.com
Saucer Smear
www.martiansgohome.com
Dan Sherman
www.aboveblack.com
Zecharia Sitchin
www.sitchin.com
SETI Institute
www.seti.org
Whitley Strieber
www.whitleysworld.com
UFO Roundup
www.ufoinfo.com
UFO Magazine
www.ufomag.com
UFO Magazine
www.ufomag.co.uk
The UFO Store

www.TheUFOStore.com
The Ultimate UFO Resource

www.ufocity.com
Universal Vision
www.universal-vision.com
Katharina Wilson
www.alienjigsaw.com
Webb, Walter N. (b. 1934). Perhaps best known as the original investigator of
the Barney and Betty Hill case, Webb has been associated with UFO research
since his own sighting in 1951.
Walter Webb
After graduating from Ohio’s Mount Union College in 1956 (B.S. degree in
biology), Webb’s interest in astronomy developed into a career. First he served
under the late J. Allen Hynek at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s
Optical Satellite Tracking program (1957-58). Duties included tracking the
world’s first artificial satellites from Hawaii. Then he spent 32 years at
Boston’s Charles Hayden Planetarium, Museum of Science, as senior lecturer,
assistant director, and operations manager. He is now retired.
Webb has served four national UFO organizations, three of them as an
astronomy consultant. For six months in 1995, the UFO Research Coalition
(represented by the three major U.S. UFO organizations) hired Webb as its full-
time investigator. Currently he writes “The Night Sky” column in the MUFON
UFO Journa1 and is the author of Encounter at Buff Ledge: A UFO Case
History. His honors include the 1996 Isabel L. Davis Memorial Award of the
Fund for UFO Research and an appointment by the J. Allen Hynek Center for
UFO Studies as its first Senior Research Associate. Both awards recognized
Webb’s many years of work in the UFO field.
POSITION STATEMENT: My personal investigations into the UFO matter

cover almost half a century. During this time I have been lucky enough to
experience my own anomalous sighting. That event alone convinced me that the
phenomenon was something real and unknown. Add to this my interviews with
several hundred witnesses, many of them claiming close encounters with highly
structured and maneuverable objects. Some of these sources even testified to
confrontations with humanoid entities associated with landed craft.
My professional science background and firsthand knowledge of known sky
phenomena lead me to believe that beyond the huge category of misperceived
objects and phenomena, there exists a small subset of manifestations which are
totally unique and yet indicative of intelligent activity. I continue to believe
only one hypothesis truly can explain the available data. I feel that very strong
circumstantial evidence exists supporting an extraterrestrial origin for some of
these reported sightings and encounters.
It seems obvious that open contact with extraterrestrials would have a
profound effect on the human race and on our fundamental institutions—in
some ways unforeseen. This awareness may well explain, at least in part, our
visitors’ enigmatic behavior. I also believe, however, earth’s citizens deserve a
truthful and complete disclosure of any and all facts that governments may be
privy to regarding UFOs. Only through an informed populace can we and our
scientists meet the challenge facing us. In the meantime the following courses
of action need to be taken:
1. Science professionals must be encouraged to explore the UFO problem
without fear of ridicule, and UFO witnesses should be encouraged to come
forth with their experiences, again without fearing derision.
2. UFO researchers need to document their investigations much more
thoroughly and in a scientific manner.
3. We must continue to seek out physical evidence.
4. Sleep paralysis imagery, a little known phenomenon, is creating false
entity reports, especially in bedroom encounter claims. Both UFO investigators
and mental health professionals must learn to recognize this phenomenon’s
potential role in UFO encounter and abduction cases.
—WALTER N. WEBB
Wellington-Kaikoura radar/visual sightings On New Year’s Day, 1979,

the news quickly spread around the world that UFOs sighted over New
Zealand’s Canterbury coast were being taken seriously by the Royal New
Zealand Air Force to the extent that Skyhawk fighter-bombers had been placed
on standby alert. Not since the famed Washington National sightings of 1952
had such a furor arose within the news media over the subject of UFOs, and for
good reason.
Never before had there been a case of simultaneous radar-visual-
photographic observations. The New Zealand sightings of December 21 and 31,
1978, involved several airborne observers, which included the pilots and
crewmembers of three separate aircraft-radar operators, both in the air and on
the ground, and on December 31, a professional TV cameraman shot several
thousand frames of 16mm color movie film of unidentified lights. The brightest
object to be captured on film was described by the camerman, David Crockett,
as having “a transparent sphere on top with brightly lit saucer-shaped bottom.”
Other “objects” were variously described as saucer- or egg-shaped with rotating
bands of red light going around the white or yellowish-white globules of light.
Up to four lights were reportedly seen at one time during the high point of UFO
activity (However, lights were seen in many different places, so it is difficult to
determine exactly how many UFOs might have been present.)
Here are the essentials of the story from the beginning:
The first sightings occurred around 12:30 A.M., December 21-22, 1978, as an
Argosy cargo plane owned by Safe-Air Ltd. departed Blenheim en route (along
the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island) to Christchurch. Captain John
B. Randle reported “a number of white lights,” near the mouth of the Clarence
River “similar to landing lights,” in the sky. Five objects were confirmed by the
powerful Wellington Air Traffic Control (WATC) radar and were considered
unexplained.
One of the famous New Zealand UFOs, as photographed by an Australian TV crew from a plane.
Around 3:30 A.M., a second Safe-Air Argosy, flying approximately the same
course as the first, also encountered UFOs. WATC received five strong returns,
which Captain Vern L. A. Powell and his copilot, Ian B. Perry, were asked to
identify. Wellington said there was a large return on the port side of the plane at
nine o’clock at a distance of forty kilometers. The two pilots looked out and
there it was. Somewhat later, Powell blurted out over the radio: “Something is
coming towards us at a tremendous speed on our radar. It has traveled some
twenty-four kilometers [fifteen miles] in five seconds. Now it has abruptly
veered off [at an estimated speed of 10,800 miles per hour]. It was moving so
fast it was leaving a tail behind it on the radar screen,” Powell said. Air traffic
controller Eric McNae at Wellington reported that one object paced the Argosy
freighter for twelve miles along the Kaikoura coast before disappearing off
their screens.
On December 26, after a flurry of news reports in the New Zealand papers,
Australian television Channel 0 in Melbourne decided to do a feature story on
Vern Powell’s experience. Reporter Quentin Fogarty, vacationing in New
Zealand at the time, was contacted for the assignment. Fogarty soon arranged
for a camera crew (which turned out to be David Crockett and his wife, Ngaire)
to accompany him on a similar trip to reconstruct for the television audience
what had happened on the same flight path ten days before.
The plane, an Argosy four-engine turboprop freighter, as before, left
th
Blenheim at 9:30 P.M. on December 30 for an uneventful trip to Wellington,
where it would be loaded with newspapers for the trip south to Christchurch.
Upon arrival at Wellington, Fogarty interviewed the controllers at WATC.
Then, at 11:46 P.M., the Argosy, piloted by Captain William Startup and First
Officer Robert Guard, departed Wellington, with Fogarty, the Crocketts, and a
full load of newspapers on board.
At ten minutes past midnight, as the plane had just passed Cape Campbell
below (twenty-five miles south of Wellington over Cook Strait), Startup and
Guard observed some unusual lights in the direction of a town called Kaikoura.
Meanwhile, Fogarty and the Crocketts were in the loading bay working on a
“stand-up” to use in their story on the previous UFO sightings. Fogarty had just
recorded this statement: “We are now approaching the Clarence River where
the highest concentration of UFOs was sighted on the morning of December
21. We’re at an altitude of 14,000 feet and we’re on exactly the same route
taken by Captain Powell when he encountered those mysterious objects. It’s a
beautiful clear night outside and naturally we’ll be looking out for anything
unusual.” Just then, pilot Bill Startup yelled: “Get up here quick!”
“There were bright globules of light pulsating and expanding and lighting up
the foreshore and town of Kaikoura,” Fogarty said. A radio call to WATC
confirmed that Wellington also saw radar targets located in the direction of
Kaikoura, about thirteen miles from the plane. The encounter had begun.
Over the next fifty minutes or so, until the aircraft landed at Christchurch,
those on board were treated to a spectacular, and at times frightening, UFO
display. Some of the activity was also captured on film, but because of the
objects’ apparent ability to appear and disappear at will, filming was very
difficult.
There were times when Wellington radar confirmed an unidentified target on
the tail of the aircraft. Reporter Fogarty, who did a taped commentary
throughout the flight, perhaps best summed up the feelings of everyone on
board, when he said: “Let’s hope they’re friendly.” Just before the aircraft
landed, Captain Startup invited the television crew back on the return leg.
December 31, 2:15 A.M.: The Argosy took off for Blenheim. It was only a
couple of minutes out of Christchurch when a bright object was observed
outside the starboard window.
The object was also picked up on the aircraft radar. At first it was within the
twenty-mile range. Later it came as close as ten miles. This time the object
didn’t disappear or fade, and David had a lot more success with his filming. He
described it as having a brightly lit base with a sort of transparent dome.
Fogarty, who was continuing his taped commentary, said at the time that it
sounded suspiciously like a “flying saucer.”
About thirty-seven nautical miles out of Christchurch, with the object still
outside the window, Captain Startup decided to turn toward it. He put the
aircraft into a 90-degree turn. The object kept its relative distance from the
plane until Startup decided to get back on course. As he turned, the object
maintained its location at the right of the aircraft, then approached the aircraft
and passed beneath the right-hand side and disappeared. During the turn, the
captain saw another bright object appear, at first higher than the aircraft and in
front. This object then passed to the left and beneath. From this point until
landing at Blenheim, those on board occasionally saw bright, pulsating lights.
Some “objects” were also picked up by ground radar.
About 10:05 P.M., Fogarty, with the film firmly clutched in his hand, took off
from Christchurch for Melbourne. News of the morning’s incredible events was
already making headlines around the world. He arrived back in Melbourne as
the New Year was dawning. Then began the major task of getting the story
together for distribution around the world.
A week after the sightings, the film was on its way to the United States for
scientific analysis. Channel 0 chose NICAP for the task. The investigation was
conducted on behalf of NICAP by Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a Navy physicist. He
spent ten days in New Zealand and a week in Australia interviewing the
witnesses and analyzing the film. He subsequently presented his findings to
several groups of scientists in the U.S. Not one of the scientists was able to
explain the radar-visual-photographic sightings in conventional terms.
Mr. Jack Acuff, former director of NICAP, said that his organization had
never previously endorsed a UFO film as being genuine but added that the
evidence in this case pointed to some new phenomenon that was probably
related to other UFO reports.
Dr. Maccabee has been a member of NICAP for twelve years. He is also op
the Scientific Board of the Center for UFO Studies, and in that capacity he
presented the evidence to Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Hynek stated his opinion that the
New Zealand evidence clearly suggests some phenom enon that cannot be
explained in ordinary terms. He criticized those in responsible scientific
positions who had publicly stated that the New Zealand film showed Venus,
Jupiter, meteors, etc., without even bothering to talk to the witnesses or to find
out at what times and in which directions the various portions of the film were
shot.
Some of the other scientists joining Dr. Maccabee and Dr. Hynek in the
opinion that the film shows something unusual are Dr. Peter Sturrock, a plasma
physicist; Dr. Richard Haines, an optical physiologist; Dr. Gilbert Levin, a
biophysicist; and Neil Davis, an electronics specialist. Other scientists, most
notably several government and industry radar specialists, requested that their
names not be used because of their sensitive positions.
—RONALD D. STORY
References
Maccabee, Bruce. “Wellington/Kaikoura radar/visual sightings” in Story, Ronald D., ed. The Encyclopedia
of UFOs (Doubleday/New English Library, 1980).
Story; Ronald D. UFOs and the Limits of Science (William Morrow/New English Library, 1981).
When Time Began (Avon Books, 1993). Zecharia Sitchin, in book five of his
Earth Chronicles series on the ancient astronaut theme, theorizes that
Stonehenge was built or inspired by alien visitors as a solar clock to chart the
passage of Celestial Time. Among other enigmas, he wonders why seven was
chosen as the number of days to represent a slice of a year known as a week.
He answers his own question by concluding that the extraterrestrial visitors we
call God first passed the six outer planets of our solar system before reaching
Earth, the seventh planet, and thus the number seven has held sacred
symbolism for humans ever since.
Whispers from Space (Macmillan, 1973). Scottish astronomer John Macvey

became, in this book, one of the first scientists to admit publicly to having had
his own UFO sighting, prompting him to urge an open mind about UFOs and
ancient astronaut theories. He suspects that alien contact with our species may
have occurred but evidence of it remains far beyond our comprehension or
ability to detect.
window areas particular geographical locations where UFO sightings and

other odd happenings frequently occur. Examples are: Sedona, Arizona; Gulf
Breeze, Florida; and Hudson Valley, New York. These and other window areas
are described in the book UFO USA (Hyperion, 1999) compiled by
“SPACEAGE: The Society for the Preservation of Alien Contact Evidence and
Geographic Exploration”).
—RONALD D. STORY
Witnessed (Pocket Books, 1996). Budd Hopkins details in this book what he
describes as the most important alien abduction case “in recorded history.”
Manhattan housewife Linda Napolitano was floated into a hovering UFO at
night from her twelfth-floor apartment window, witnessed by Perez de Cuellar,
Secretary General of the United Nations, and two of his American bodyguards.
X
X-Files (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp./Fox-TV; Producer: Chris Carter).

This popular TV series, which premiered in 1993, has a pronounced symbiotic
relationship with modern UFO-ET mythology. So much so that virtually every
element of UFO lore has been incorporated into these weekly scifi mystery
dramas.
Heavily laden with conspiracies and cover-ups—covert liaisons between the
U.S. Government and aliens, UFO-abduction tieins, genetically-engineered
deviants, and virtually every aspect of paranormal phenomena that can be
imagined—the show basically follows the exploits of two young FBI agents,
Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, as they investigate all of it in pursuit of the
“truth.”
Their credo is summed up by two catch phrases: “The truth is out there” and
“trust no one”—which taps into the paranoid suspicions of many. However, the
greater appeal probably has to do with the series’ visual artistry, interesting and
attractive lead characters, and the bizarre nature of the horrors endured. And, of
course, almost everyone enjoys a good mystery, which X-Files usually
provides.
The show has been called “provocative,” “intriguing,” “spooky,”
“incredible,” “eerie,” “creepy,” “intelligent,” “paranoid,” and “preposterous”—
all of which is true.
—RONALD D. STORY
Y
Yorba Linda (California) photo At twilight on January 24, 1967, fourteen-

year-old “Tom X” (name withheld by request) was reportedly startled by a
dark, hat-shaped object hovering outside a second-storey window of his home
in Yorba Linda, California. He rushed quickly to an adjacent room and returned
within seconds with his inexpensive Mark XII fixed-focus camera. Tom said
that the object had moved farther away from the windowpane, but that he was
still able to snap one black-and-white picture before running downstairs,
shouting for his family to come and view the bizarre visitor.
Tom X’s family lived in a small, relatively isolated town on the edge of
rapidly growing Orange County. He regularly used a mail-order film company
to process his photos, but they had lost a roll of film shortly before this
incident. So instead of trusting his UFO picture to the mails, he had a fourteen-
year-old friend develop it for him.
Tom’s friend tried his best, but the negative and photo emerged scratched
and dulled. In addition, it was light-struck and/or fogged. Later, professional
cleaning restored it to reasonable clarity, but nothing could be done about
several long scratches which had been produced by the camera’s faulty winding
mechanism.
When the sighting and photo came to this writer’s attention in June 1967, it
was subjected to analysis by six photographic experts during the next four
years. Equipment used included sophisticated aerospace photogrammetric
systems. The consensus of the experts was that the hat-shaped image denoted a
solid, three-dimensional, free-flying object. It seemed to be either stationary or
moving at slow speed.
Tom X had reported four thin appendages hanging down from the bottom
rim, but by the time he snapped the photo, the object had apparently withdrawn
or otherwise folded up one of them, one expert theorized. Double exposure,
cutouts, hand-thrown, or string-suspended models were ruled out. The object’s
true size was judged to be about twenty inches in diameter along its horizontal
axis and about two feet in height, and was about one hundred feet from the
camera.
The dark, hat-shaped object photographed by “Tom X” on January 24, 1967. (Lines across the
photo are scratches from the camera’s faulty winding mechanism.)
Tom’s character and reliability were checked. He was determined to be an

honest, intelligent individual, who was well thought of by his friends and
school authorities. His family verified the fact that he was in a highly excitable
state after viewing and photographing the object. However, they could not
corroborate the sighting itself, because the object had disappeared by the time
other family members hurried back upstairs with him.
The entire X family, which included Tom, his parents, and sister, had
witnessed a large silvery object with lighted windows on January 4, 1967, just
twenty days before the hat-shaped object was photographed. Prior to that time,
none of the family had any interest in UFOs, and even considered the subject
unreal and uninteresting. Following the January 24th occurrence, a
considerable number of other more-distant UFOs were sighted by members of
the X family and other residents of Yorba Linda and surrounding communities.
Tom X had the impression that the January 24th object was “gigantic,” but
this might have been due either to his excited state, an optical illusion, or the
fact that the object when first seen was actually very close to the window.
Investigation revealed that when first seen, it subtended and angle of about
sixteen degrees and about one degree when the photo was taken.
Tom’s visual impression was that the bottom rim was continuous and slanted
like a top hat; however, the photo showed the rim was actually composed of
egg-shaped bulges, from which the legs apparently protruded.
Another sighting of a similar object was reported from Wapello, Iowa, by
another fourteen-year-old boy, Douglas Eutsler, on March 22, 1967, about two
months after Tom’s sighting. Douglas reported the sighting to the Air Force,
and his sketch appeared in a December 1967 U.S. magazine. The two witnesses
did not know each other.
Douglas reported that the bottom part of the object was rotating. This might
be a possible clue why Tom X saw the rim as a continuous slope, rather than as
egg- shaped protrusions as revealed in the photo. Eutsler reported the object as
large, also, but there was no objective way to measure the Wapello object’s true
size. Perhaps the phenomenon of size constancy, in which the brain zooms in
like a telephoto lens could be applied to both cases.
The initial decision by NICAP (the National Investigations Committee on
Aerial Phenomena) was that the photo was a hoax (a cutout or small model at
the window-photographed with a close-up lens). The object was further studied
by means of comparison photos, and the NICAP conclusion was proved to be
in error.
Densitometer readings by a major California aerospace firm yielded the fact
that the object had photographed much darker than it should have, if its true
color was black, as reported by Tom X. This situation was clarified when
further analysis by a Southern California geodetic survey firm revealed that the
object’s color was probably red, which would photograph darker than black. It
was subsequently learned that Tom X’s color perception was faulty. He saw
deep red (or maroon) metal and/or light as black sometimes. Therefore, the
possibility that the object was metal and/or glowing red must be considered.
As in most of the best UFO photos, the investigation of the Yorba Linda
picture is ongoing. The witness/photographer “Tom X” has generously granted
permission for researchers to use it without restrictions, and it is no longer
copyrighted. It has become accepted by prominent researchers in the UFO field
and is now a part of the official UFO packet distributed to the media by the
Fund for UFO Research. In 1999, a computer-enhancement expert studied the
Yorba Linda photo and confirmed its three-dimensionality. He also found a
faint highlight on the body of the craft, indicating probable reflection of
sunlight off the rounded surface, consistent with the position of the sun at the
time of sighting.
The object in the Yorba Linda photo does not conform to any classic UFO
category. However, small, apparently unoccupied UFOs have been reported
often. Because of, the care taken by photogrammetric analysts, however, it is a
potentially important piece of evidence. It is certainly among the closest UFO
photographs taken to date.
—ANN DRUFFEL
Yungay (Peru) photos These photos were reportedly taken in 1967 by

Augusto Arranda while he was trekking in the mountains near Yungay, located
at about 10,000 feet in the Huaylas Valley of north-central Peru. Arranda had
borrowed a camera from Cesar Ore, an acquaintance, who operated a tourist
office in Yungay. The photos were given to the Aerial Phenomena Research
Organization (APRO) for analysis.
Yungay photo #1
One of the photos came to APRO’s attention, in 1968, through an indirect

means. After some investigation, the photo was traced back to the Kodak
Peruana S.A. processing laboratory, where an employee, in violation of
company rules, had retained copies of the photos at the time they were being
commercially developed. Kodak officials confiscated the photos from their
employee before APRO could locate him and refused to produce them (they
were obtained in 1969 through Eastman Kodak’s International Markets
Division in Rochester, New York). No Kodak records were available to trace
the photos to their original source.
The location of a full set of the photos, in Yungay, was made known to
APRO by an official in the Peruvian Ministry of the Navy. A trip was made to
Yungay, where the three missing photos (being retained by Kodak Peruana
S.A.) were found and obtained from Mr. Ore. Arranda, the photographer, had
mailed copies to Mr. Ore after the former returned to Lima, the capital. Arranda
had presumably sent the negatives to Kodak for processing, explaining the two
independent sources brought to APRO’s attention.
Yungay photo #2
In spite of intensive investigation, Mr. Arranda was not located by APRO,

although conclusive evidence of his existence was obtained. Consequently, the
details concerning the observation and the photography are not known; neither
are the original negatives available for analysis. Although original prints exist
in the United States, and several scientists have examined them, they have not
been subjected to a comprehensive analysis. Their authenticity has thus been
occasionally questioned. However, nothing emerged during APRO’s
investigation to indicate a hoax. No publicity or commercialization was ever
attempted by the photographer or by Ore. On the contrary, it took much effort
to trace the photographs.
Yungay photo #3
In May 1970, a strong earthquake struck central Peru, resulting in the death
of over 70,000 persons. During the earthquake, a glacier was dislodged from
Mount Huascaran, one of the tallest peaks in the Andes mountain range,
causing a large avalanche of ice, rocks, and mud to descend on Yungay at a
speed of about 200 miles per hour. The entire town and almost its entire
population of 20,000 persons were buried instantly. The earthquake has been
called “the most catastrophic natural disaster in the history of the Western
Hemisphere and ranks high among the world’s greatest natural disasters” (see
Reps, William F., and Simiu, Emil, “Case Study: Engineering Geology and
Siting Problems Related to the Peru Earthquake of May 31, 1970,” in Design,
Siting and Construction of Low-Cost Housing and Community Buildings to
Better Withstand Earthquake and Windstorms. National Bureau of Standards
Building Science Series 48, U. S. Department of Commerce).
Yungay photo #4
The original camera and one original print which remained with Mr. Ore
were lost in the avalanche. It is not known if Mr. Ore survived, and further in-
country investigation was not undertaken.
—ETEP STAFF
Z
Zeidman, Jennie R. (b. 1932). Jennie Zeidman has been involved in UFOlogy
since 1953, when, as a senior at Ohio State University (where she earned her
B.A. degree in English), she was a student of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and later his
secretary and research assistant in the early days of Project Blue Book. She is
now retired and divides her time between Columbus, Ohio, and Mt. Crested
Butte, Colorado.
Jennie Zeidman
E-mail: zeidman@crestedbutte.net

POSITION STATEMENT: I am by nature a skeptic. When I first became
associated with Dr. Hynek and UFOlogy in 1953, I was convinced that all
reported events could be explained in terms of already understood and identified
phenomena: The only requirements were better investigations and better
analysis. My position remained thus until about 1966. No single incident
changed my mind; rather the sheer weight of the evidence, building case by case,
and my personal involvement in interviewing dozens of witnesses, in the United
States and abroad. My awareness of the history and philosophy of science and
my accessibility to the reliable data contributed to my growing uneasiness.
During the period of 1966-70, I gradually backed away from a “there’s nothing
to it” stance, opening my eyes to the astounding similarity of global reports and
the undeniable credibility of many of the witnesses. With the advent of more
sophisticated investigatory techniques, I have seen the data strengthened and
their validity sustained.
I now believe unequivocally that “there is something” to UFO phenomena.
What, I cannot say. I have never proposed a theory of extraterrestrial
intelligence to explain the reported events, yet certainly that theory cannot be
ruled out. Whatever their meaning, their origin, their motives, UFO phenomena
have, I believe, demonstrated their validity as a challenge to both physical and
behavioral scientists. The subject is eminently worthy of serious research.
—JENNIE ZEIDMAN
Zwischbergen (Switzerland) photo On the afternoon of July 26, 1975,

three Dutch hikers (B., his brother H. and their friend M.), were about to take
on the last kilometers of a two-day mountain trip in the Swiss Alps, when at
approximately 3 P.M. they allegedly encountered a circular object hovering in
the air in front of them. The “UFO” seemed to be made of “some sort of metal,
not unlike aluminum.” It had a dull gray color and its shape resembled that of
an inverted soup-plate, “at least 15 meters in diameter.”
The object appeared to be suspended over the small village of
Zwischbergen, at a distance of 100 to 500 meters. B. succeeded in taking a
color slide of the phenomenon. Immediately after the photo was taken, the
object started to move and glided behind the trees where it disappeared from
view.
Zwischbergen photo, taken in Switzerland on July 26, 1975: a stereotype image of a “flying
saucer”-type UFO from the seventies.
Back in the Netherlands, B., H., and M. showed the slide to a fellow-
member of a local parochial choir, whom they knew was a co-worker of the
country’s largest (now defunct) UFO group NOBOVO. In the years that
followed, the case received world-wide publicity. It is usually referred to as
“the Saas Fee photo,” because of the proximity of this well-known ski resort to
the location of the alleged sighting.
The late Dr. J. Allen Hynek once referred to the “Saas Fee photo” as one of
the best UFO photos ever. and UFO photoanalyst William H. Spaulding, after
conducting a computerized image evaluation in 1977, concluded that “the
object size is 25-30 feet in diameter” and “was ‘removing’ some of the fog/haze
layer as it moved toward the camera”.
Eight years after details of the case had been published, additional “eye-
witness testimony” surfaced. A group of Belgian tourists reportedly
photographed “something odd in the sky” on that same day, at the same time.
This second photo was taken from the village of Eison, only 49 km west of the
location where the three Dutchmen had taken their picture.
These exceptional circumstances prompted CAELESTIA, a Belgian
research and publication project for atmospheric anomalies, to undertake a
follow-up investigation. Their findings were published in 1994 in a book called
Unidentified Aerial Object photographed near Zwischbergen, Switzerland, on
July 26, 1975.
A closer view
Study of the original slide by photo experts confirmed that the photo showed
a three-dimensional object. With the image itself being explicit enough, only
two possible interpretations remained: either the object is a meters-wide craft of
unknown origin, or a small model. Although the investigation did not make it
possible to decide either way, several circumstantial elements were uncovered
that seem to point in the direction of a hoax. To wit:
• The analysis conducted by Spaulding proved seriously flawed and was found
to be conducted, not on the original slide, but on a third or fourth generation
print.
• It turned out that the slides preceding and succeeding the unidentified object
photo were missing from B.’s slide collection (creating a suspicion that they
were removed from the collection because they showed less succesful
attempts to create a UFO shot).
• The rim of the object appears to be “dented” (possibly as a result of ungentle
landings from previous attempts to get the object in the air in front of the
camera.
• The dark coloration of the bottom-side of the object indicates that the image
was not affected by aerial perspective, suggesting that the object was small
and close to the camera.
• Attempts to imitate the photo with the help of an aluminum camping-plate
yielded similar “flying saucer” pictures (video images of the sighting
location confirmed that it is quite easy to launch and recuperate frisbee type
objects at the site).
• Witness M., who emigrated to New Zealand in 1983, confirmed the sighting
only after he contacted the other two witnesses.
• There existed a suitable climate for concocting a pratical joke of this nature:
(a) similar bogus “flying saucer” pictures were common in the press those
days; (b) only hours before the UFO shot was taken, the witnesses had
created and photographed a funny face using a rock and dressing it up with a
pair of glasses and a sun-cap; and (c) a few days before the trip to
Zwischbergen, the group had already sighted a strange, light-reflecting object
in the sky—“probably a weather balloon”—which they had jokingly referred
to as a “UFO”).
• In spite of the large number of potential witnesses (popular ski-resorts in the
valleys adjacent to the Zwischbergen valley, an air show at a nearby airfield
and a major traffic congestion 20 km north north-west of the sighting
location), no corroborative eye-witness testimonies were found that confirm
the presence of an unconventionally shaped, meters-wide airborne vehicle
over the Zwischbergen valley on the day the photo was taken.
Furthermore, the second photo taken at Eison that same day, proved
irrelevant after study. Most likely it depicts a bird and was taken, not at the
same time, but approximately one hour after B.’s UFO shot.
—WIM VAN UTRECHT

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The

The Mammoth Book of Great British Humour

Compiled and Edited by

First published online by Ronald D. Story as The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters on

Copyright © Ronald D. Story, 2001

ISBN: 978-1-78033-703-6 (ebook)

Printed and bound in the UK

Roswell Incident, The

Those Gods Who Made Heaven and Earth

During the compilation of this encyclopedia, I experienced something of a

Abducted: Confrontations with Beings from Outer Space (Berkley,

abduction The phenomenon of forcible, involuntary capture of a human being

Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (Charles Scribner’s Sons,

SEX AND REPRODUCTION

2) A substantial share of abductees sense an “alien connection” from a realm

4) A substantial share of the abduction subjects describe an impending

5) A disturbing number of subjects in the project claim the U.S. military-

POSTSCRIPT: While “abductionists” such as Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, and

Although Wright acknowledges his belief in the reality of UFO abductions,

abductions Also known as Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (CE-IV

1) Capture. Alien beings capture a human to take aboard a spaceship.

Above Top Secret (Sidgwick and Jackson/William Morrow, 1987). British

Adamski, George (1891-1965). A Polish immigrant, without formal

According to Frank Edwards, writing in Flying Saucers—Here and Now!

Cover art from Adamski’s first book,

Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) APRO was founded

Aetherius Society An international metaphysical, scientific, and religious

6202 Afton Place

Web site: www.aetherius.org

This woodcut appeared in an 1896 newspaper

airship wave of 1897 The California airship reports of November and

Another expert, Trey Stokes—a Hollywood special effects “motion

alien iconography. The familiar image of the little, big-headed humanoid

ALIEN TIME LINE

I felt that, though humanoid in form, the extraterrestrials would be at

Alien Identities (Govardhan Hill, 1993). Richard Thompson relates how

In-depth studies of UFO/CE-3 entities have been few. The Humanoids

Fig. 1. Human-type entities

A. MUFON idealization of a typical human entity. B. Australian case, 9/6/73. C.

A. MUFON idealization of a humanoid entity. B. Humanoid specter from the

Fig. 3. Animal CE-3 entities

A. MUFON idealization of a CE3 animal (based on a Brazilian case). B. Animal

A. A robot with a highlighted navel area, a pattern in other entity descriptions,

Fig. 5. Exotic CE-3 entities

A. One of several exotic entities, Kelly-Hopkinsville, Kentucky, 10/21/55. No

A. Apparitional humanoid emerged from a ball of light, Garden Grove,

Fig. 7. Children’s drawings of aliens

A. A female human UFOnaut, perhaps a self-portrait. B. Oddly, this humanoid

Fig. 8. CE-3 traditional entity parallels

Fig. 9. CE-3 entities’ navel and umbilical symbolism

A. Giant B. Pooka C. Kelpie D. Stock E. Fachan F. Fairies

Fig. 11. Six creature types from Alice’s Wonderland

Fig. 12. Six creature types in Shakespeare

Though Shakespeare particularized his non-human creatures in wondrous

A. Theseus, the human Duke of Athens. B. Puck or Robin Goodfellow, a

A. The adventurously human child heroine, Dorothy. B. Munchkin-style

Parallels in traditional and CE-3 entities: A well-established pattern in folklore

Frequencies of CE-3s and UFOs: Nobody knows how many abductions or

Allagash abductions This was a multiple-witness abduction that involved

UFO observed by America West pilots (Drawing by Susan Swiatek)

Anatomy of a Phenomenon (Henry Regnery, 1965). Jacques Vallée begins

Ancient Astronaut and SETI Society (AAS) Originally known as the

• The origins of life on Earth

Membership is the AAS is open to all.